Pitt researcher’s work featured by U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; Trib Live, November 12, 2019

Patrick Varine, Trib Live; Pitt researcher’s work featured by U.S. Patent & Trademark Office

"Rory Cooper, who was recognized earlier this year by the office with a trading card created to honor U.S. inventors, holds more than two dozen patents related to mobility-improvement research. Cooper is the director at Pitt’s Human Energy Research Laboratories, a U.S. Army veteran and also serves as director of the Paralyzed Veterans of America Research Foundation...

Cooper was recognized in the patent office’s SUCCESS report, an update on progress achieved through the 2018 Study of Underrepresented Classes Chasing Engineering and Science Success (SUCCESS) Act. The act aims to promote patent applications by women, minorities, veterans, the disabled and other underrepresented classes.

“Without diversity of thought, potentially life changing work for wheel chair users and others with disabilities might not be possible,” Cooper said. “We have a world-class team at our labs that is committed to helping people with disabilities and older adults live full lives and contribute to society as much as they can and they like.”"

Why Your Diversity Program May Be Helping Women but Not Minorities (or Vice Versa); Harvard Business Review, 8/8/16

Even Apfelbaum, Harvard Business Review; Why Your Diversity Program May Be Helping Women but Not Minorities (or Vice Versa) :

"When it comes to issues of race, gender, and diversity in organizations, researchers have revealed the problems in ever more detail. We have found a lot less to say about what does work — what organizations can do to create the conditions in which stigmatized groups can reach their potential and succeed. That’s why my collaborators — Nicole Stephens at the Kellogg School of Management and Ray Reagans at MIT Sloan — and I decided to study what organizations can do to increase traditionally stigmatized groups’ performance and persistence, and curb the disproportionately high rates at which they leave jobs.

One tool at any organization’s disposal is the way its leaders choose to talk (or not to talk) about diversity and differences — what we refer to as their diversity approach. Diversity approaches are important because they provide employees with a framework for thinking about group differences in the workplace and how they should respond to them. We first studied the public diversity statements of 151 big law firms in the U.S. to understand the relationship between how organizations talk about diversity and the rates of attrition of associate-level women and racial minority attorneys at these firms. We assumed that how firms talked about diversity in their statements was a rough proxy for their firm’s approach to diversity more generally.

Two findings were particularly intriguing."

Why So Few "Diversity Candidates" Are Hired; Harvard Business Review, 6/24/16

[Video] Harvard Business Review; Why So Few "Diversity Candidates" Are Hired:

"Finalist pools can reinforce the status quo. For more, read "If There's Only One Woman in Your Candidate Pool, There's Statistically No Chance She'll Be Hired.""

PSO challenge: It’s not easy building the audience of the future; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3/18/15

Editorial Board, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; PSO challenge: It’s not easy building the audience of the future:

"While the PSO has not suffered the catastrophic decline that forced orchestras in Philadelphia, Syracuse and Louisville to declare bankruptcy, attendance has plunged since the 1970s, when it sold more than 200,000 tickets to its classical-concert series, compared with 96,610 last year. Last season, just 57 percent of seats at Heinz Hall were sold; the rest were given away or unfilled.

To learn why, the PSO hired a North Carolina firm to interview people who are typical of symphony goers (white, married, middle-aged and middle- to upper-income) but who don’t attend. Their responses may be useful in attracting that demographic, but the symphony also needs to get answers from minorities and millennials if it wants an audience for the future.

In 1937, the median age of audience members at classical concerts across the nation was 28. By 2008, it had risen to 49."