He received his PhD in 2009 from Harvard University, and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and SLAC before joining the faculty of JHU in 2012. As a faculty member, he has been the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship. Kaplan has worked on an array of topics including phenomenology, cosmology, and scattering amplitudes, but for the past five years he has focused on the bootstrap approach to AdS/CFT and quantum gravity. He is currently working on the problem of information loss from three-dimensional AdS black holes using two-dimensional CFT techniques.