Dan Adelman conducts research on internal pricing mechanisms for operational control, in which central management sets internal prices for various resources in the firm's operation. He also studies revenue management/pricing optimization, and supply chain management. He devises state-of-the-art methodologies, such as in the area of approximate dynamic programming, to address complex, real-world operational problems faced by firms. His current work focuses on optimizing supply chain contract portfolios and strategic capacity allocation across customers and markets. He is also studying the linkage between operational performance metrics and the financial performance of the firm. Adelman interacts regularly with companies, and bases his research on problems that he sees in a variety of industries, including chemical distribution, airlines, hotels, third party logistics, fiber-optics manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing, oil, healthcare, and others.

Adelman has received several awards, including the George B. Dantzig Prize in 1998 for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. He publishes regularly in leading academic journals, and serves as Associate Editor at Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Operations Research.

He received a PhD in industrial engineering and operations research in 1997, in addition to a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and master's degree in operations research from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Adelman joined the faculty in 1997.