About Dr. Cox & His Work
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 the son of an Army officer, he grew up moving around the U.S. and overseas, getting exposed to many cultures and different ways of viewing the world. As a teen, he had his most extreme experience with prejudice when his parents threw him out for being gay, and he was homeless. Despite that rocky period, over many years, he was able to rebuild his relationship with them, giving Dr. Cox further firsthand experience in the process of creating meaningful change. Because of these and other experiences, Dr. Cox made it his life’s work to combat prejudice, stereotyping, and inequality using the science of cognitive-behavioral change.
Research and Career
Dr. Cox is a scientist-practitioner in the realm of social justice. His work 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 Dr. Cox’s scientific research 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, most especially the bias habit-breaking training, which has been shown to be highly effective at creating lasting, meaningful changes related to bias and diversity. Dr. Cox has personally delivered the bias habit-breaking training live to over 100 audiences around the world, adapting it for many different professions and domains, including university faculty and staff, graduate students, grade school teachers, lawyers, judges, doctors, police officers, tech companies, and many others. He is also one of two co-hosts of our organization’s official podcast, Diverse Joy, which was recently ranked in the top 15% of all podcasts.
Dr. Cox is the Founder/CEO of our organization, Inequity Agents of Change, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to widespread dissemination of evidence-based methods to create lasting, meaningful change, built on the foundation of the bias habit-breaking training. We provide training and resources to individuals and organizations around the world, harnessing the science of cognitive-behavioral change to empower people as agents of change to reduce bias, create inclusion, and promote equity.
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. In Business magazine named Dr. Cox one of Madison, Wisconsin’s “Forty Under 40” Class of 2024. His work has been featured several times on NPR and WPR, and has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Atlantic, and other major outlets.