He completed his Ph.D. at the Department of communication of the Université de Montréal in 1996, under the supervision of James R. Taylor.
Cooren also completed a postdoc at the Université de Louvain-la-Neuve, in Belgium.
Cooren is former President of the International Communication Association (2010–2011), an ICA fellow since 2013 and an NCA distinguished scholar since 2017.
Cooren's research mainly focuses on organisational communication in mundane and emergency situations.
That particular point of view, inspired by the works of Taylor and Van Every,[1] Weick and others, leads Cooren to use interaction analysis and conversation analysis as his main source of data, although, whereas other interaction or conversation analysts do not seek to explain anything beyond the observed interaction, Cooren, following the works of Harold Garfinkel or even Gabriel Tarde, uses the micro - the interactions - to find an explanation to what takes place at the macro - organizational - level.