By MARTY LEVINE

“Don’t take no for an answer and be tenacious,” Rory Cooper suggested during the latest Staff Council Coffee and Conversation event on Jan 15. “I’ve had several of my bosses say, ‘You’re nothing if not tenacious.’ … You’ve just got to keep pushing your way through.”

Cooper is assistant vice chancellor for research for STEM-Health Sciences collaborations and distinguished professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, as well as founding director and VA senior research career scientist of the Human Engineering Research Laboratories.

He came to Pitt from California for a three-year stint 32 years ago, “and I’m still here,” Cooper said. The night before this public interview event, he had flown in from California again, this time because he was helping to plan the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles as part of the U.S. Olympians and Paralympians Association’s executive committee. He won the bronze medal in the 4x400 meter wheelchair relay at the 1988 Paralympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, and has since been involved in planning many of these quadrennial events.

Why did he stay originally?

Pitt in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cooper said, had an ambitious strategic plan, aiming at many things, including “actually becoming a world class medical school,” so the University recruited Thomas Starzl, who started the transplant institute. Pitt also recruited some of the early bioengineering faculty — “I was among those,” Cooper noted. “Bioengineering didn’t actually exist — it was faculty sprinkled all around the University and then eventually became a program that eventually became a department.

Pitt also recruited Freddie Fu to start the sports medicine program and grow orthopedic surgery while beginning a new focus on geriatrics, and turned the School of Allied Health Professions into the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.

“Academic medicine was transitioning and they were going to start UPMC” from Pitt’s Medical and Health Care Division. “So Pitt put on a full court press. Really haven’t seen anything quite like it since. … They brought in probably the largest cohort of faculty since I’ve been here; there were probably 60 of us recruited, all within a five-year time frame,” creating new institutes and national centers in the process.

Cooper’s own journey to bioengineering did not proceed in a straight line, he explained: “As a soldier, when I got injured, I didn’t have much choice, and it was pretty hard to continue to be a soldier in a wheelchair. There’s been a few of my friends who managed to make that, but that really wasn’t an option at the time I was injured. So I had to find a new career path, and oddly enough bioengineering was not what I wanted to do.

“That’s why I studied electrical engineering first. I’m a big NASA fan and a Disney fan. I thought, well, I can either get into animatronics or I can go and work for NASA, and NASA is somewhat to blame that I wound up in bioengineering. When I interviewed for the job at NASA, I actually did work on Skylab and then on the space station. They were like, ‘You know, you’re too smart; you’ll get bored here. You need to get your PhD and come back.’ I said, ‘Oh, OK.’ That’s kind of a weird thing to say in a job interview.”

Eventually he did go for his PhD, at University of California–Santa Barbara, in robotics, but then switched to bioengineering, where a new mentor gave him a final push toward rehab technology.

Cooper only recently added his new administrative position. “I want to learn more about the University at the bigger picture,” he explained, “rather than looking from the bottom up, so maybe get a little bit higher up the ladder and look down a little bit and see and be involved in the planning in the future. I told you I was part of that big cohort and how that transformed (Pitt) … and so I think we really need to do that again.

“There are two challenges we’re still facing but we’re moving towards addressing. We need more institutes and centers that bring faculty, different students and staff actually, from different schools together, and the satellite campuses as well, to really conduct world-class team research — where you have the equipment and the people, where you can compete at a global scale. So I’ve been working on this centers-and-institutes policy, and mentoring faculty: how do you work together.

“The other thing is we already have a lot of great faculty that are not very well recognized by their peers. We’re pretty well represented in the National Academy of Medicine but very highly underrepresented in the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. …

“Pittsburghers are really bad about promoting themselves and nominating themselves and there are other universities that are really, really good at it. That’s something we have to get better at because it does affect your U.S. News and World Report (ranking) and affects donors, affects student choices.

“Along that line we also have not done so well on major awards, like the National Medal of Science, the National Medal of Technology Innovation, National Medal of the Arts” — all awarded by the federal government — “for that matter Nobel prizes. … Some of those prizes are $5 million, $10 million, half a million dollars. I’ve won a few; I’ve donated those funds to help support the University and most of the people tend to do that. So it’s another sort of revenue stream that people don’t think of. As I got to know a couple of Nobel laureates, they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s how I finance my lab nowadays. I just go from one prize to the other.’ So it’s better than writing grants, but it’s a pretty select group.”

Asked a final question — What’s your favorite hidden gem on Pitt's campus? — Cooper offered: “I have a funny one. My favorite hidden gym on Pitt’s campus is the ramp in the Cathedral of Learning that used to lead to Rob Rutenbar’s and Kathy Humphrey’s office. I fought for that ramp for 30 years. And finally Rob was the only one that would listen to me, because everybody else said it can't be done, it would ruin this historical part of the Cathedral. I would bet that students that are here now don’t even know that ramp wasn’t there from the beginning. They did a beautiful job, so it looks great. And then they actually put a proper ramp in this summer to the chancellor's office. Before that I had to do a bit of wheelchair mountaineering to get to the chancellor's office.”

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

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