Spencer Cochran is a research and development associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is also a University of Tennessee–Oak Ridge Innovation Institute Fellow, working with the institute’s Transportation Convergent Research Initiative. 

Cochran currently leads a wireless power transfer initiative at ORNL that aims to increase the transfer distance in modern WPT systems. His research interests include high switching frequency converter design, wireless power transfer, multi-level and switched capacitor converter architectures, and control modeling.

His graduate work focused on wireless power transfer at both 150 kHz and 6.78 MHz, which included power stage design, system tuning, distortion reduction, and dual-loop control design. Cochran was a power engineer with Astranis Space Technologies Corp. for 3.5 years in San Francisco, CA where he aided in designing their satellite systems.

Education