Liberty Mutual Research Institute Cox began his career in 1952 as the director of the now-shuttered
Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. His research centered on industrial noise exposure and the potential impact on worker hearing loss. This work included the first
longitudinal study of audiometric histories of employees in industrial noise.
Central Institute for the Deaf In 1955, Cox was recruited by
Hallowell Davis to leave Boston and come to
Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis. Davis, Director of Research at CID, challenged Cox to implement an idea for measuring hearing in infants. In 1961, Cox and his graduate student, A. M Engrebretson, designed and built a special-purpose digital computer used by Davis to pioneer the field of early detection of deafness. This research has since led to mandated screening tests for newborn infants throughout the United States. an organization dedicated to the introduction of small computers to biomedical research. His pioneering work in radiation treatment planning paved the way for systems in worldwide operation. His research team developed computer methods for reconstructing images from CT and PET scanners that aid in the diagnosis of cancers and cardiovascular disease. His innovations were instrumental in developing early monitors for heart rhythm disturbances. He also worked on computer applications in mapping the human genome and in electronic radiology. In 1964, Cox brought the LINC (the Laboratory INstrument Computer) and its development team to Washington University from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. This team included
Wesley A. Clark,
Severo Ornstein, and
Charles Molnar. The LINC is considered by some to be the first
minicomputer, and a forerunner to the personal computer.
The New York Times series on the history of the personal computer had this to say in an article on August 19, 2001, "How the Computer Became Personal": "In the pantheon of personal computing, the LINC, in a sense, came first, more than a decade before Ed Roberts made PC’s affordable for ordinary people. Work started on the Linc, the brainchild of the M.I.T. physicist
Wesley A. Clark, in May 1961. Each Linc had a tiny screen and keyboard and comprised four metal modules, which together were about as big as two television sets, set side by side. The machine, a 12-bit computer, included a one-half megahertz processor. Lincs sold for about $43,000 – a bargain at the time – and were ultimately made commercially by Digital Equipment, the first minicomputer company. Fifty Lincs of the original design were built." Four remaining LINCs exist, one each at the
Computer History Museum,
Washington University, the
Heinz Nixdorf Computer Museum and at the
DigiBarn Computer Museum. Both BCL and CSL played a major national role in pioneering the acceptance of laboratory computing by the biomedical research community. Their successful projects not only closely involved scientific collaborators but also introduced students from the engineering disciplines into the biomedical research laboratory.
Washington University Beginning in 1955, Cox was an assistant professor, associate professor, and then professor of electrical engineering. In 1975 he became the founding chairman of the School of Engineering and Applied Science's first Department of Computer Science and guided the department's development and growth for more than 15 years. Cox was instrumental in building a department that has an international reputation for biomedical computing applications and computer networking. With
Jonathan S. Turner and Guru Parulkar, he co-founded the Applied Research Laboratory in 1988.
Entrepreneurial career Cox,
Jonathan S. Turner and Guru Parulkar founded Growth Networks in 1998. Growth Networks produced an advanced networking chip set which focused on high performance switching components for internet routers. He served as Founder and Vice-President of Strategic Planning until the company was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2000. In 2007, he launched a new company, Blendics, Inc., that provides system-on-chip design tools and services to companies that wish to develop complex, proprietary, low-power integrated circuits and aids in the development of asynchronous computing systems. In 2015, inspired by concepts created by
Wesley A. Clark, Cox founded Q-Net Security, Inc., a cyber-security firm. ==Personal life and death==