One of Pittsburgh's top research scientists, Rory A. Cooper, received the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, for his careerlong crusade to improve assistive technology for those with disabilities. His research reflects his own life experience: He was paralyzed from the waist down after being struck by a bus when he served in the U.S. Army.
Cooper developed a lightweight wheelchair for himself before completing his education. He then went on to help found the Human Engineering Research Laboratories with the University of Pittsburgh and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Today, he is the vice chancellor of research at Pitt, and he spoke to WESA's Priyanka Tewari on Morning Edition.
Priyanka Tewari: Did you ever think that you would build a wheelchair or any kind of system that would take you all the way to the White House?
Roy Cooper: No, I really started building them originally for myself, just because the technology was so poor at the time. And then as I got introduced to wheelchair sports and went on to further my education, I realized that there was a much greater need across the United States and around the globe. I think it's really my calling.
Since you describe your work as your calling, what is it that motivated you in the first place to dedicate your life to this? You were paralyzed in 1980.
It was pretty blatantly obvious that I was not the only one that had been struggling with inadequate wheelchair technology at the time. And and I didn't really think too much about it until I discovered Rehabilitation Engineering and my professor said I could actually create new technologies for people with disabilities and do that as a profession. And I thought, 'Wow, that's the thing for me.'
I understand that when one is hurt, you have to adapt yourself physically to your disability. But then there's a psychological aspect of it, as well. You talk to a lot of disabled veterans who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq. What advice do you give them? How do you communicate that there is hope on the other side?
Well, every person is unique, but the main message I try to convey is to be forward looking, and to focus on those things that you can do and those opportunities in front of you, rather than on those things that you lost so that they can understand that they still have a lot to contribute.
Do you think that mentality of having served in the armed forces, did that in any way enhance your drive and your will to succeed, to overcome?
I think so. You know, we have a saying in the military improvise, adapt and overcome. There's also a community within the military, and within the veterans community. I always found a lot of strength and support working with other veterans.
You can probably work anywhere in the world. Why did you choose to carry out your life's work here in Pittsburgh?
That's a great question, and nobody's ever asked me that before. To me, what's exciting is there are multiple universities that actually work reasonably well together. So it's been pretty exciting to bring students from all those different programs together.
And then we have a large, active, and vibrant veterans community here as well. So it's kind of a unique environment here. It's actually in some ways a great place to do the work that we do because we have weather, we have hills. You can kind of test everything here. If we were, you know, somewhere like in Phoenix, Ariz., where it's all fairly new and flat, single story construction, it wouldn't have the same environment. If it works in Pittsburgh, it probably would work pretty much everywhere.
