In 1998, Cox collaborated with colleagues Jonathan S. Turner and Guru Parulkar in founding Growth Networks (acquired by Cisco Systems in 2000).

Cox was responsible for bringing the Laboratory INstrument Computer, known as LINC – along with its development team including Wesley A. Clark, Severo Ornstein, and Charles Molnar – to Washington University in 1964.

LINC, which was developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory in 1962, is a contender for the title of the first personal computer because it can be managed by a single individual.

[2] After serving in the U.S. Army from 1943–1944, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned bachelor's (1947), master's (1949), and doctoral degrees (1954) in electrical engineering, with an emphasis in acoustics.

[3] Cox began his career in 1952 as the director of the now-shuttered Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

Davis, Director of Research at CID, challenged Cox to implement an idea for measuring hearing in infants.

In 1961, Cox and his graduate student, A. M Engrebretson, designed and built a special-purpose digital computer used by Davis to pioneer the field of early detection of deafness.

His research team developed computer methods for reconstructing images from CT and PET scanners[9][10] that aid in the diagnosis of cancers and cardiovascular disease.

Lincs sold for about $43,000 – a bargain at the time – and were ultimately made commercially by Digital Equipment, the first minicomputer company.

Both BCL and CSL played a major national role in pioneering the acceptance of laboratory computing by the biomedical research community.

Their successful projects not only closely involved scientific collaborators but also introduced students from the engineering disciplines into the biomedical research laboratory.

In 2015, inspired by concepts created by Wesley A. Clark, Cox founded Q-Net Security, Inc., a cyber-security firm.