Dr. Donald C. Cole

Senior Scientist

MD, University of Toronto

In the summer of 1973, Donald Cole, not yet a doctor, was working in London, England, as an office assistant for Amnesty International. There, he developed a deep sense of social consciousness.

Cole pursued his physician’s training at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s. In the process, he became keenly interested in occupational and environmental health in a global context.

Something happened in medical school that would change his life. “In my second year, I had a professor in occupational health and research who profoundly affected the direction of my studies,” Cole says. “I became absolutely fascinated by the field of occupational health. I couldn’t believe how little I knew about it... and how important it was.”

This captured his imagination so much so that he obtained a specialty in occupational medicine and has devoted much of his career to it. Decades after medical school, Cole is the director and founder of the Collaborative PhD Program in Global Health at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and the interim head of the Division of Global Health. He is an associate professor in community medicine/epidemiology, lead instructor in a Global Health Collaborative Program Seminar and a lead instructor of an environmental epidemiology course.

Mentoring graduate students is something that’s particularly meaningful to Cole. For many years, he has been supervising PhD and master's students. In June 2011, Cole was awarded the esteemed Robin Badgley Award for Teaching Excellence in Public Health Sciences.