Donald C Cole

Donald C Cole Graduated in medicine from the University of Toronto (MD, 1978). From McMaster University he obtained a Masters in Design, Measurement and Evaluation in Health Services (MSc, 1991). He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, with specialty certifications in Occupational Medicine (1990) and Public Health & Preventive Medicine (1992). A EcoHealth research fellowship was followed by work as an Institute for Work & Health researcher and University of Toronto professor. He has led/collaborated on multiple research, policy and training grants and contracts from municipal to international funding organizations, with an emphasis on multi-stakeholder action research processes. He has supervised or co-supervised numerous masters’, doctoral and post-doctoral trainees, using exploratory, observational and intervention designs and a variety of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. He has co-authored over 250 peer-reviewed publications and over 40 chapters, and lead-edited a book.
His forty years of practice include: primary care at multiple community health centres; environmental-occupational consultation services; public health with colleagues from all levels of government. In collaborative teams he has addressed a range of: determinants (e.g. social class, gender, ethnicity); exposures (e.g. dietary, pesticides, biomechanical, psychosocial); populations (e.g. rural children and adults, farmers & farmworkers, manufacturing, office workers); interventions (e.g. pesticide health and safety programs, workplace ergonomic programs, municipal by-laws); health outcomes (e.g. , food security, anthropometry, infection, neurotoxic, reproductive, musculoskeletal, psychological); severities (e.g. early symptoms through functional impairments, health care utilization, work disability, to death), and locations (e.g. Ontario, Central America, South America, East Africa, South-East Asia).