Bruce Cooil


Bruce Cooil is The Dean Samuel B. and Evelyn R. Richmond Professor of Management at Vanderbilt University in the Owen Graduate School of Management. He is well known for his research in statistical modeling and its application to decrease mortality and morbidity rates due to coronary heart disease and improve the healthcare of impoverished regions like Mozambique.

Life and work

Bruce Cooil was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1953. Cooil received his B.S. in Mathematics at Stanford University in 1975, M.S. in Statistics at Stanford University in 1976, and Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. He joined Vanderbilt University's faculty in 1982. In addition to Cooil's statistical modeling research in healthcare, his statistical modeling research in business marketing focuses on customer loyalty issues where he received a number of awards for his findings in the fallacy of the Net Promoter customer loyalty metric, and in predicting changes in existing customer spending habits more accurately through the use of customer perception questions. Also in the field of statistics, he created the concept of proportional reduction in loss, a general framework for developing and evaluating measures of the reliability of particular ways of making observations which are possibly subject to errors of all types. Cooil has won the annual Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence six times.