Professor D. James Cooper AO 

BMBS MD FRACP FCICM FAHMS 

Jamie Cooper is Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine (SPHPM) at Monash University, and Senior Specialist in Intensive Care at The Alfred Hospital, Melbourne. In 2017, he was awarded an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished service to intensive care medicine in the field of traumatic brain injury as a clinician, and to medical education as an academic, researcher and author. In 2021, Professors Jamie Cooper and Rinaldo Bellomo were jointly awarded the Research Australia GSK Award for Research Excellence (ARE) in recognition of their global leadership and innovative research in critical care medicine that has helped transform approaches to the treatment of critically ill patients worldwide. The GSK ARE is one of the most prestigious awards available to the Australian medical research community. Prof Cooper is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) L3 Leadership Fellow, full Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at Monash University and Hon. Professorial Fellow in the Critical Care and Trauma Division at The George Institute for Global Health, University of Sydney. He has >400 publications including 18 in New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Lancet, and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). He has been a Principal or Co-investigator on peer reviewed research grants exceeding $91M including 45 NHMRC/MRFF grants. Research foci include randomised clinical trials in traumatic brain injury (TBI), sepsis, acute lung injury, resuscitation fluids, and blood transfusion.

He has published three landmark trials including the DECRA trial (CIA NHMRC#314502), which demonstrated unexpectedly inferior long-term outcomes for an increasingly popular neurosurgical intervention (early decompressive craniectomy) that was opposite to apparent short-term benefits, and has initiated international TBI practice review. The trial results were fast tracked for NEJM publication (Cooper DJ, et al. 2011) and were editorialised in the Lancet as “one of the most important clinical trials of a therapy for severe TBI ever conducted”. The trial results have been a watershed in changing current practice and have proved invaluable from both an individual patient and community perspective. This has been incorporated into the international Brain Trauma Foundation practice guidelines. Restricting decompressive craniectomy to selected patients will improve TBI patient outcomes overall and reduce health care spending on lifetime care of severe disability survivors. DECRA was included in Yale University’s 50 most important papers of all time “that shaped the current clinical practice of neurology” and was also included in the “50 of the most important studies in Critical Care Medicine” by Harvard University and Oxford University Press.