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Alumnus Kenneth H. Cooper, M.D.
“One thing I’ve enjoyed about making money is giving it away,” says Kenneth H. Cooper, M.D.
Cooper, the “Father of Aerobics,” has certainly been generous to UW Medicine. First, he created the Kenneth H. Cooper, M.D. Research Endowment in Preventive Cardiology. And then, with additional gifts made over the past year, Cooper transformed his research fund into a professorship.
The professorship is part of Cooper’s dream, a dream that began in the late 1960s and continues today.
In 1956–57, Cooper was an intern at Harborview Medical Center. He’d taken up some bad habits — too much eating, too little exercise — and paid for them with a cardiac arrhythmia at the age of 29. That episode “shot me back to reality,” he says. Cooper took up exercise, noting the improvements fitness made to his mood, cholesterol and blood pressure. Later, while working for NASA, Cooper devised exercise programs to improve astronauts’ strength and endurance before space flights. He also designed a 12-minute fitness test for the U.S. Air Force, now a standard in assessing aerobic fitness.
When Cooper left the military in the late ’60s, he wanted to strengthen the field of preventive medicine, and in 1968, he published his first book, Aerobics. In 1970, he opened the doors of his first clinic. Now, the Cooper Clinic, the Cooper Aerobics Center and the Cooper Institute, located in Dallas, are now major forces in promoting cardiovascular health and research.
But because Cooper’s dream is to “change the whole health pattern of America,” he’s not resting on his laurels. The Cooper Institute is creating a planned community that focuses on preventive health care, for instance. In addition, Cooper is promoting physical education classes in public schools, and he has created the Kenneth H. Cooper, M.D. Endowed Professorship in Preventive Cardiology at UW Medicine, a fund which will help recruit and retain fine faculty in his field.
The professorship is part of his dream. But Cooper also sees it as an obligation. “Alumni owe something to their schools,” he says.
2007
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