Colorado State University

Dr. Tim Coburn joined the Systems Engineering faculty at CSU after serving as Founding Director of the School of Energy Economics, Policy and Commerce, and as Professor of Energy and Operations Management, at The University of Tulsa.

Formerly he served as the Mesa Petroleum Professor of Statistics and Management Science, Director of the School of Information Technology and Computing, and Associate Dean for Technology Initiatives in the College of Business at Abilene Christian University. Other work engagements have included managerial and technical roles at Marathon Oil Company, Phillips Petroleum Company, the Center for Transportation Technologies and Systems at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the School of Applied Computational Sciences at Meharry Medical College where he was also an affiliate faculty member at Vanderbilt University.

Dr. Coburn has also held visiting teaching and/or research positions at The University of Denver, Sandia National Laboratory, US Geological Survey, Kansas Geological Survey, the University of Colorado-Denver, and the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) at the University of Colorado-Boulder. In addition to his current work at CSU, Dr. Coburn holds a joint appointment at NREL in the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA) and serves as a faculty researcher in mobility analytics within the Energy and Environment Science & Technology Division at Idaho National Laboratory.

Prof. Coburn’s research activities are centered on interdisciplinary applications of statistics, analytics, and data science in energy and transportation operations, along with associated systems and policy analysis. Recent publications and presentations include:

• Machine learning approaches to identify lithium concentration in petroleum produced waters
• A geospatial method for calculating BEV charging inconvenience using publicly available data.
• Developing a profile of medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicle adopters with text mining and machine learning
• Price responsiveness of shale oil: A Bakken case study
• Managing the electricity-gas interface: Current environment and emerging solutions
• Systems engineering of in-line inspection tools for hydrogen pipelines
• Systems engineering design of a mass-E charging facility of the future
• Agrivoltaics systems and life cycle analysis

Professor Coburn is a long-term member of the Energy Statistics Committee of the American Statistical Association (ASA), an advisory/consultancy panel for the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), as well as ASA’s Transportation Statistics Interest Group. He also serves as an Associate Editor of Natural Resources Research, and is a member of the editorial review boards of Frontiers in Environmental Science (Environmental Systems Engineering) and the PDPU Journal of Energy and Management.