NEWS

College of Business professor to speak at international conference

Sep 19, 2011 | General News

Dr. James J. Cochran, Bank of Ruston, Barnes, Thompson and Thurman Endowed Research Professor and associate professor of quantitative analysis at Louisiana Tech University, will give the closing plenary presentation at the 2011 Conference of the Operations Research Society of Eastern Africa (ORSEA) in Nairobi, Kenya, October 12-15.
Cochran will also chair the first INFORMS/IFORS/ORSEA International Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium during the conference.  In this forum, operations research educators from North America and Eastern Africa will give workshops on novel and innovative approaches to college-level operations research.

Dr. Jim Cochran - Louisiana Tech College of Business


The conference, which is the largest annual operations research conference in the East African region, is expected to bring together hundreds of experts in operations research from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Somolia, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Comoros, Zambia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Mauritius, Seychelles, and other African nations.
Conference partners include the University of Nairobi School of Business (Kenya), the Makerere University Business School (Uganda), and the University of Dar es Salaam Business School (Tanzania). 
This summer, Cochran gave the opening plenary presentation at the XLIII Simpόsio Brasileiro de Pesquisa Operacional (XLIII Brazilian Symposium of Operational Research) in Ubatuba, Brazil.  The conference brought together over 600 experts in operations research from throughout Latin America.  He has been invited to summarize his talk on “Finding Great Cases and Active Learning Exercises in Strange Places.” in a paper for the academic journal, International Transactions in Operational Research.
Cochran, who received his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Cincinnati in 1997 and joined the Louisiana Tech College of Business faculty in 2000, is considered a leading authority in the areas of sample based and Bayesian optimization, statistical methods, computational statistics, and statistical learning.
For more information, please contact Debbie Van De Velde in Louisiana Tech’s College of Business at 318-257-3741 or debrav@latech.edu.
Written by Debbie Van De Velde – debrav@latech.edu