In Memoriam: Richard I. Cook

Dr. Richard Cook was is an internationally recognized expert in safety, incident analysis, and resilience in complex systems. His professional experience included work in the fields of medicine, transportation, manufacturing, and information technology. He was affiliated with the Cognitive Systems Engineering Lab (CESL) at The Ohio State University and he was a principal in Adaptive Capacity Labs.  Two of his most notable contributions were “How Complex Systems Fail”, a talk he gave at Velocity 2012,  and Behind Human Error (2010), which he co-authored with David Woods, Nadine Sarter, Sydney Dekker, and  Leila Johannesen.  Richard Cook gave the keynote address at the 2019 HFES Healthcare Symposium (Chicago), during which he spoke about the resilience of bone and resilience engineering. 

An extensive biography/obituary about Richard Cook’s career and impact in human factors, safety, and resilience engineering is available here.