Sheldon H. Jacobson is an American educator, noted for contributions that apply operations research to problems related to aviation security, public health, Presidential election forecasting, and NCAA basketball.
Subsequently, he joined the faculty of the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in 1988, and then the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech in 1993.
In 1995, Jacobson and John E. Kobza authored the first paper demonstrating how operations research models could be used to optimize the performance of aviation security systems.
[15] In late 2016, he published a study[16] showing that waiving the $85 TSA PreCheck fee would result in a net savings of $34 million due to reduced screening costs.
[21] Jacobson's research on the relationship between obesity, fuel consumption, and transportation established the first association between a public health problem and how the built environment may have unexpected, deleterious societal consequences, in this case, costing over a billion extra gallons of gasoline each year.
[25] In 2016, while a Donald Trump victory was one of 21 scenarios forecast by the site,[26] its "neutral" analysis gave Hillary Clinton a 99.2% chance to win on the morning of election day.
[27] BracketOdds provides an analytics perspective on March Madness, with appearances in national media coverage including the Chicago Tribune,[28] NBCNews.com,[29] Bleacher Report,[30] and Men's Health.