Richard Cook, MD, a faculty member in the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care from 1994 to 2012, died on August 31, 2022. He was an internationally recognized expert in medical accidents and understanding how to enhance safety in complex systems, as well as a colleague, friend, and mentor to many members of the department and throughout the BSD and UChicago Medicine.
Dr. Cook was a clear-thinking scholar and a superb communicator who had the courage to dissent from the prevailing opinion. He influenced the trajectory of healthcare delivery, patient safety, and medical device design through his multi-faceted career as a physician, anesthesiologist, and software engineer. His research on systems failure informed work to develop new designs for technology and digital tools to support cognitive work by practitioners instead of burdening it with additional constraints and disruptions at critical moments.
He thought actively and creatively about safety and how complex systems fail for the past two decades and helped change how people think about these issues in aviation, space exploration, health care, and software systems. You can find a lengthy synopsis of his life and wide-ranging influence published here by Adaptive Capacity Labs, a company Dr. Cook founded to help software companies build resiliency in their organizations.
Dr. Cook is survived by his wife, Karen; three children, Cliff, Kristin, and Kara Schwandner and their spouses; his father, Richard G. Cook; his siblings, Sue and Paul Cook; and six grandchildren. He is remembered as an extraordinary person, both funny and generous with his time, an incomparable doctor and a wonderful husband, father, grandfather, and valued member of the UChicago community in every sense.
