Alison Cooper is a British businesswoman who is currently the chief executive of Imperial Tobacco, the world’s fourth-largest tobacco company as measured by market share.

Cooper grew up in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey, in a family where "money was stretched." She was educated at the nearby Tiffin Girls' School, an all girls grammar school and earned a degree in mathematics and statistics from Bristol University. She spent a gap year teaching in Kenya on a voluntary basis.

Cooper went to work for accountancy firm Deloitte, Haskins & Sells as an auditor. The company later became PricewaterhouseCoopers, in which she worked in acquisitions and strategy planning. She joined Imperial Tobacco in 1999 as group financial controller, before rising to COO, then CEO.

Cooper has been Chief Executive of Imperial Tobacco since March 2010, taking over from Gareth Davis, who had held the position for 14 years. In October 2012, Cooper noted that she and Burberry’s Angela Ahrendts were the only two female CEOs running FTSE 100 Index companies. Despite this, she has stressed that she does not support the introduction of quotas intended to increase female participation in boardrooms.

In February 2013, she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.

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