In 2020, Neva Hudiburgh Cochran, MS, RDN, LD ’78, established the Neva Cochran Scholarship Endowment in Nutrition at Texas Woman’s to support graduate students accepted into the Dietetic Internship Program. She now has expanded her gift with the establishment of a generous planned gift to support more students following in her footsteps.

A portion of Cochran’s estate gift will be used to increase the principal of the current scholarship endowment to provide more funding for nutrition graduate students, with the remaining portion of the gift providing critical funding to support research in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences.

Cochran earned her master’s degree in nutrition from Texas Woman’s University after receiving her bachelor’s degree in nutrition and dietetics from the University of Oklahoma. She went on to earn awards throughout her career as a registered dietitian nutritionist.  

A communications consultant based in Dallas, Cochran partners with food, nutrition, and agricultural organizations to promote positive, accurate and scientific-based nutrition messages. From 1990–2013, she contributed to the weekly magazine Woman’s World, where she created meal plans, compiled research for the diet cover stories, wrote the Diet Club column for eight years and authored several feature articles for an estimated 7 million readers. She also authored a monthly nutrition article for Southern Dallas County Business and Living Magazine from 2012–2022 and for Lake Forest Living from 2018–2021.