From first meeting to Fellow: A professional lifetime with INFORMS

Published: January 16, 2026

I’m so excited to be joined by someone whose name is deeply woven into the fabric of the INFORMS community – Dr. Jim Cochran, Professor of Applied Statistics and the Mike & Kathy Morone Research Chair at the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business. Jim is a longtime INFORMS member, past recipient of the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice and INFORMS Presidents Award, and a Fellow of INFORMS, the American Statistical Association, and the African Academy of Sciences, and a tireless advocate for analytics education, international collaboration, and community engagement. He’s attended more INFORMS meetings than most of us can count – and today we’re talking about what has changed, what has stayed the same, and why INFORMS remains such a meaningful home for so many members like Jim.

I think you’ve got to follow your passion, you’ve got to follow your intensity. I think you have to find something that means something to you. You have to find something that, at the end of the day, you go home, you have your dinner and you put your head on your pillow, and you can feel pretty good about what you did. That’s important and that can be just about anything. It can be applications in business, I know a lot of people who get a lot of satisfaction out of that. It can be work in sports, that’s lot of fun, that’s satisfying. It can be humanitarian issues. But find something that means a lot to you, it will be easier for you to take that further than something you don’t really care about.

Interviewed this episode:

Jim Cochran

University of Alabama

James J. Cochran earned a BS in Economics, an MS in Economics, and an MBA from Wright State University in 1982, 1984, and 1986, respectively. He earned in Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Cincinnati in 1997, and he has been a Visiting Scholar with Stanford University, the University of South Africa, the Universidad de Talca, Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci, the University of Limpopo, and the University of Namibia. He holds honorary faculty appointments with the University of KwaZulu Natal and the University of Limpopo.

Dr. Cochran’s research focuses on problems at the interface of statistics and operations research, and he has taught a wide variety of statistics and operations courses from the introductory undergraduate level through Ph.D. seminars. He established an international teaching effectiveness colloquium series and has organized these events in Uruguay, South Africa, Colombia, India, Tanzania, Argentina, Kenya, Nepal, Cameroon, Australia, Croatia, Cuba (twice), Estonia, Fiji, Mongolia, Moldova, and Bulgaria. Dr. Cochran is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and the Management Sciences, Wiley Series in Operations Research and Management Science, and INFORMS Analytics Body of Knowledge. He has published fourteen book chapters and over forty research articles, and he is co-author of seven textbooks in statistics, operations research, and analytics. He has served as a consultant to a wide variety of corporations, government agencies, and not-for-profit organizations around the world. He was a founding co-chair of Statistics without Borders and a member of the founding committee for INFORMS Pro Bono Analytics initiative. He has also delivered keynote addresses to conferences in twenty-five nations. In 2008 Dr. Cochran received the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice, in 2010 he received the Mu Sigma Rho Statistical Education Award, and in 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 2014 he received the American Statistical Association’s Founders Award, in 2015 he received the Karl E. Peace Award for outstanding statistical contributions to the betterment of society, and in 2017 he received the American Statistical Association’s Waller Distinguished Teaching Career Award and was named a Fellow of INFORMS. In 2018 he received the INFORMS President’s Award, and in 2019 he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Cincinnati.