As a middle-school student living in California, Cochran experiences the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
[3] From 2007 until 2011 Cochran was an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, until she joined the United States Geological Survey.
[7] In 2006, Cochran co-foundered of Quake-Catcher Network, a crowd-sourced program that detects earthquakes.
[10][11] Later, Cochran was the lead scientist for ShakeAlert, an early warning system for earthquakes in the western United States.
[12][13] In 2006 Cochran received the Doris M. Curtis Outstanding Woman in Science Award from the Geological Society of America.