D CEO is pleased to honor Dr. Kenneth Cooper with the Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the magazine’s 2018 Excellence in Healthcare Awards program.
Cooper is a groundbreaking physician and health innovator with more than 50 years of experience in making the world a healthier place.
Cooper’s first bestseller Aerobics revolutionized the way people thought about health by encouraging everyone to exercise, contrary to the advice of many other healthcare professionals at the time. Though we take this adage for granted today, before the book published 50 years ago only 100,000 joggers were exercising. Now our trails and sidewalks overflow with over 34 million runners nationally. In Brazil, he trained the 1970 Brazilian soccer team on their way to a World Cup victory, and they still call jogging “coopering” in Portuguese today.
The success of Aerobics allowed him to open and found the Cooper Clinic and Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research, which recently partnered with the NFL and more than 1,000 schools nationwide with FitnessGram, a physical fitness test that is meant to fight childhood obesity and is part of Texas’ physical education curriculum.
Prior to founding the clinic, Cooper served for 13 years in the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force as a flight surgeon and director of the Aerospace Medical Laboratory. He developed fitness tests that are still used today by the military, schools, and other organizations worldwide.
“The thing that changed my career was I was water skiing on Lake Texoma. Halfway through, my heart started beating out of my chest,” Cooper told D Magazine in 2010 about how his life bent toward fitness. “I thought I was having a heart attack, but the doctor said I was just out of shape. That shot me back. I lost the weight within a year.”
Today Cooper serves as chairman of seven health companies, as well as nonprofit The Cooper Institute.
Click here to learn more about the other Excellence in Healthcare finalists—including professionals who have helped make Texas a leader for healthcare innovation.
Winners will be revealed at an exclusive awards event on November 29 at the Westin Dallas Downtown.
