Chad Cook

Dr. Cook is a professor at Duke University with a Category A appointment in the Duke Clinical Research Institute and an adjunct appointment in the Department of Population Health Sciences. He is a clinical researcher, physical therapist, and profession advocate with a long history of clinical care excellence and service and academic experience. His passions include refining and improving the patient examination process and validating tools used in day-to-day physical therapist practice. He received his BS in physical therapy from Maryville University (St. Louis) in 1990 and his PhD from Texas Tech University in 2003.

Dr. Cook received fellowship status at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Manual Physical Therapists in 2006. He is a Catherine Worthingham Fellow of the American Physical Therapy Association. Dr. Cook has published more than 350 peer-reviewed papers, has been part of $11 million in external funding, and has keynoted on six continents and in numerous countries. He has two textbooks in their second editions and a third textbook in its first edition. Dr. Cook has a long-standing history of service roles as an editor in chief or associate/special topics editor for multiple journals, including JOSPT and BJSM.

Dr. Cook has won numerous awards locally at Duke for teaching, is the 2009 Baethke-Carlin award winner for the American Physical Therapy Association, is the 2008 recipient of the Helen Bradley Career Achievement Award, and is the 2005 winner of the J. Warren Perry Distinguished Authorship Award. Dr. Cook was the Pauline Cerasoli lecturer in 2017 and received the John McMillan Mennell Career Award for Service from AAOMPT in 2021. In addition, Dr. Cook is the 2011 winner and the 2012 and 2013 cowinner of the AAOMPT Excellence in Research Award. Dr. Cook has also been awarded the APTA Helen J. Hislop Award for Outstanding Contributions to Professional Literature.