Lex Frieden

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Lex Frieden is one of America's pre-eminent disability activists and leaders of the independent living movement. He is a Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, at Baylor College of Medicine and since 2002 he has been Chairman of the National Council on Disability (NCD), a presidentially appointed body. He was the 1998 winner of the Henry B. Betts Award for outstanding achievement in disability rights.

As Senior Vice President of the The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research, (formerly Texas Institute for Rehabilitation and Research) in Houston, Frieden is responsible for grants administration. He also is founder and director of the Independent Living Research Utilization unit of TIRR.

Frieden was one of the major figures behind the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. In his capacity of Executive Director of NCD in the mid-1980s, reporting to presidentially appointed Council members notably including Vice Chairman Justin Dart, Frieden oversaw the work of Robert Burgdorf in writing the first drafts of what was to become the ADA. The Council issued a major report, Toward Independence, to further the effort along. The ADA became law on July 26, 1990.

Frieden's service in the 1970s included membership on a task force empaneled by Olin E. ("Tiger") Teague (1910-1981), U.S. Congressman from Texas, to study what was and was not being done in disability-related research across the entire swath of the U.S. Government. That panel's work led, in 1978, to creation of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), a unit of the US Department of Education.

Lex Frieden was born in Alva, Oklahoma, a town in northwestern Oklahoma. In 1967, he began studying elecrical engineering at Oklahoma State University. It was as a freshman that he sustained a spinal cord injury in an automobile accident. As part of his rehabilitation from that injury, he went to the TIRR in Houston, where he met Dr. William A. Spencer, the great rehabilitation medicine visionary. Dr. Spencer became Lex's mentor. Among many other things, Spencer brought Lex onto the Teague-appointed research panel that Spencer chaired.