Dr. Lawrence Kaplan has devoted his entire medical life building sustainable bridges between academic pediatrics and applied community-based care of children with special needs, something he learned to aspire to during his time at UVM.

As a respected professor of Pediatrics and educator, he has worked tirelessly for forty-five years, all over the world in the care of children with complex special health care needs and developmental disorders, especially those in underserved settings. He graduated from UVM in 1981 completing his internship and residency at Boston Children’s Hospital in 1984 and stayed on there to help design and complete the first formal fellowship at Children’s that combined Genetics, Neurology, and Child Development to equip him to carry out his goal to care for children with a broad range of disabilities and their families.

Just out of fellowship, he established Boston Children’s Hospital’s Complex Care Program, now a major program at that institution, and from that platform, along with state agencies, schools, and Early Intervention programs, became instrumental in adapting key elements of complex care to underserved rural and urban communities. Always with the goal of training—and teaming with primary care providers in community settings, he rose through the academic ladders at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, receiving three outstanding faculty awards for student and resident/fellow teaching. He applied his tested principles to the regions those academic institutions served and is loved by his patients and their families he’s cared for.

He led the Americares—Pan-American Health Organization effort to address health care disparity for disabled children in Jamaica, assisted the Polish Government to create a network of rural community-based care hubs, and in 2012 was the principal participant and lead-author of work with Disability Rights International and the UN which led to the Republic of Georgia revising its policies related to children with birth disabilities.

A tireless clinician, and uninclined to accept full retirement, Dr. Kaplan is now a senior consultant and professor at Royal Free Hospital, London, in the Community Pediatrics Program where his wife and children also live and work, teaching and caring for children in one of London’s most ethnically diverse population areas.