Unraveling the mysteries of ‘The Bat Lands’

Published: December 17, 2024

In this episode, I have the pleasure of welcoming back to Resoundingly Human long-time INFORMS member Jim Cochran, professor with the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business. In addition, I’m joined by Ryan McNeill, deputy editor for the Reuters global data journalism team.

Jim and Ryan are members of an investigative team that was recognized with the 2024 Scripps Howard Award for Excellence in Multimedia Journalism for their work on The Bat Lands, a groundbreaking science series exploring the origins and potential outbreak sites of bat-borne viruses.

We knew pretty early on that we were going to have to tell this story in a different way, it couldn’t just be a wall of text – 3,000 words of zoonotic spillover – and that was the thinking behind this. We knew from the outset that we were going to have to tell the story differently, and we have just an incredible desk of intelligent graphical journalists and illustrators who helped bring the story to life.

Interviewed this episode:

James 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.

Ryan McNeill

Reuters

Ryan McNeill is the London-based deputy editor for the Reuters global data journalism team. He relocated to London in June 2018 after six years in New York for Reuters. Previously, McNeill has worked on enterprise stories about failures in the National Flood Insurance Program, antibiotic resistant infections, sea level rise and the underground market for adopted children. He has previously worked for The Dallas Morning News, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and The Oklahoman. He is a graduate of Oklahoma State University.