Dr. James J. Cochran, Bank of Ruston, Barnes, Thompson and Thurman Endowed Professor in Marketing at Louisiana Tech University, was recently awarded the 2010 National Statistical Education Award by Mu Sigma Rho National Honor Society. This award recognizes excellence in undergraduate or graduate statistical education at the institutional, regional, or national level.  Mu Sigma Rho, the national honorary society for statistics, promotes and encourages scholarly activity in statistics, and recognizes outstanding achievement among the students and instructional staff in eligible academic institutions. Cochran received his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Cincinnati in 1997 and joined the Louisiana Tech College of Business in 2000.  He is considered a leading authority in the areas of sample based and Bayesian optimization, statistical methods, computational statistics, and statistical learning. Written by Debbie Van De Velde – debrav@latech.edu