James J. Cochran is associate dean for research, a professor of applied statistics and the Rogers-Spivey Faculty Fellow at The University of Alabama. Born in Dayton, Ohio, he earned his B.S., M.S. and M.B.

A. from Wright State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. He has been at The University of Alabama since 2014 and has served as a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Universidad de Talca, the University of South Africa and Pole Universitaire Leonard de Vinci. Dr. Cochran has published more than 50 papers in the development and application of operations research and statistical methods. He has published in numerous journals, including Management Science, The American Statistician, Communications in Statistics-Theory and Methods, Annals of Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, BMJ Global Health and Statistics and Probability Letters.

Dr. Cochran received the 2008 INFORMS prize for the Teaching of Operations Research Practice, the 2010 Mu Sigma Rho Statistical Education Award and the 2016 Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award from the American Statistical Association. Dr. Cochran was elected to the International Statistics Institute in 2005 and was named a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2011 and a fellow of INFORMS in 2017. He also received the Founders Award in 2014 and the Karl E. Peace Award in 2015 from the American Statistical Association. In addition, he received the INFORMS President's Award in 2019. A strong advocate for effective operations research and statistics education as a means of improving the quality of applications to real problems, Dr.

Cochran has chaired teaching effectiveness workshops around the globe. He has also served as an operations research or statistics consultant to numerous companies and not-for-profit organizations.