Tim Cochran was a valedictorian for the Severna Park High School Class of 1973.

Later, he was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982 (Embedding 4-manifolds in S5).

He died unexpectedly, aged 59, on December 16, 2014,[2] while on a year-long sabbatical leave supported by a fellowship from the Simons Foundation.

Cochran was also responsible for naming the slam-dunk move for surgery diagrams in low-dimensional topology.

While at Rice, he was named an Outstanding Faculty Associate (1992–93), and received the Faculty Teaching and Mentoring Award from the Rice Graduate Student Association (2014)[4] He was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society[5] in 2014, for contributions to low-dimensional topology, specifically knot and link concordance, and for mentoring numerous junior mathematicians.