Kelvin Cochran, the U.S. Fire Administrator, will be leaving the post to return to his previous position as Chief of the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department.

Mayor Kasim Reed announced today that Cochran is the nominee for the position. In 2009, Cochran was appointed by President Barack Obama as the head of the United States Fire Administration in Washington, D.C.

Accepting the appointment, Cochran said, "It’s an extreme honor to have been appointed by Mayor Kasim Reed to return to Atlanta as the next Fire Chief of the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department. Serving at the Federal level has truly been a highlight of my fire service career. Being America’s Fire Chief cannot be understated, but I believe being Atlanta’s Fire Chief is my career purpose and calling."　

In an interview with FireRescue magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Tim Sendelbach shortly after accepting the post of U.S. Fire Administrator, Cochran noted that he’d never expected his "fire service dream" to culminate in a federal post, but that he consistently welcomed new challenges. "I have this thing about me where I get uncomfortable when things get comfortable, and I deliberately do things to disrupt my comfort zone," Cochran said at the time. "And I believe that has really caused me to have the leadership tenacity I needed here in the city of Atlanta for the last 20 months to lead us through these tough economic times, and I’m carrying that same spirit with me to the USFA as the fire administrator."

During that interview, Cochran stated his goals for his tenure at the USFA, which included increasing the USFA’s focus on high-risk populations, "more aggressively and assertively pursuing something that will curtail the tremendous loss of life of firefighters and injuries to firefighters," developing a department vulnerability self-assessment, and increasing the USFA’s "outreach in training and development and really begin to focus on fire officer training and chief officer training."