Jerry Cochran, PhD, MSW

Dr. Jerry Cochran is a Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Epidemiology at the University of Utah and serves as the Director of Research for the Program on Addiction Research, Clinical Care, Knowledge, and Advocacy within the Division of Epidemiology. He also has an adjunct Professor appointment within the University of Utah School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and is core faculty with the Informatics, Decision-Enhancement and Analytic Sciences Center of Innovation within the VA Salt Lake City Health Care System. Dr. Cochran has extensive expertise in clinical-level behavioral health services research. His experience has focused on development and testing of evidence-based practices for addressing opioid misuse, use disorder, and related health conditions and outcomes—with particular emphasis on perinatal opioid use disorder. The majority of funding for his work has come from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the state of Utah. Dr. Cochran is a Multiple-PI for the Greater Intermountain Node of the NIDA Clinical Trials Network (CTN), in which he is the lead, site PI, and coinvestigator on large scale multisite clinical trials testing interventions for opioid use disorder. He is currently PI, MPI, or coinvestigator on a number of studies focused on designing, testing, and implementing services and interventions for those with substance use disorder and associated risks. He has published 105 articles within peer-reviewed journals, with the majority specifically related to monitoring and treatment of opioid-related risk and addiction. During the last 10 years of Dr. Cochran’s academic career, he has been primary or on the mentoring teams of more than 20 students, fellows, and junior faculty across diverse training backgrounds within the health sciences disciplines—including urology, obstetrics, public health, and social work (to name of few). Given the varied professional backgrounds of these individuals and career aspirations, it has been important for Dr. Cochran in these experiences to align expectations with these mentees. To do so, he seeks to maintain effective communication by having weekly or monthly meetings that follow a format of checking in progress, answering current questions, and revisiting and adjusting short- and long-term goals as needed. These regular meetings also enable Dr. Cochran to assess understanding of the individual and their need to gain additional training in specific areas, to engage in work around publishing, and submitting grants. These regular meetings also allow him and an individual mentee to work together to promote professional development experiences that are tailored to helping the individual to maintain their personal life while staying focused on their career and achievement. In these experiences, he has published extensively with these individuals, aided them in successfully obtaining extramural funding (including federal funding), and helped them to launch into the next steps of their education and careers in academia, health care, and industry. In achieving these accomplishments, Dr. Cochran consistently seeks to foster independence of these mentees by having them begin by working on his projects, then moving to lead some aspect of his projects, and then finally leading out in their work. Dr. Cochran has also had extensive classroom teaching experience, including research methods, evaluation methods, and healthcare policy courses. Altogether, his current research portfolio, mentoring track record, and teaching experiences have uniquely prepared me to be a significant contributor to the currently proposed program—enabling it and the trainees that will be associated therewith to achieve their laudable goals.