About Dr. Cox & His Research Lab
Personal Background
William Taylor Laimaka Cox’s personal experiences with prejudice started at a very young age. Growing up in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic family, Dr. Cox saw how his family’s broad spectrum of skin color led to differential treatment by others. As a teen, he had his most extreme experience with prejudice when his parents threw him out for being gay, and he was homeless. Because of these and other experiences, Dr. Cox made it his life’s work to combat prejudice, stereotyping, and inequality.
Research
Dr. Cox’s research all serves the ultimate goal of understanding and reducing the injustice, human suffering, and disparities that arise from stereotyping and prejudice. A key theme throughout his work is understanding fundamental processes at play in stereotyping and bias, especially how neural, cognitive, and cultural processes lead to the perpetuation of stereotypes and biases. His work also serves as a bridge between basic, fundamental science and translational, applied intervention work: he leverages advances in basic knowledge about stereotype perpetuation to develop, test, and refine evidence-based interventions to reduce bias.
Accolades
Dr. Cox received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His contributions to basic and translational research on stereotyping and bias reduction were recently recognized by National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH in the form of a Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award. His work has been featured several times on NPR and WPR, and has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Vanity Fair, and other major outlets.
Most recently, Dr. Cox has founded the nonprofit organization Inequity Agents of Change, which seeks to promote evidence-based approaches to reducing bias and creating inclusion throughout the public domain.