a brief biography
If you can't sleep and want to see the whole CV in pdf format, click here.
Back to DWT's comprehensive web page.
David Waltner-Toews is an epidemiologist, essayist, poet, fiction writer, veterinarian, and a specialist in the epidemiology of food and waterborne diseases, zoonoses (diseases other animals share with people) and ecosystem health. Much of his research is on integrating socio-economic, cultural, environmental and health concerns using community-based systems approaches.
As of 2006, besides being an author on about 90 peer-reviewed scholarly papers, he has published half a dozen books of poetry, a collection of poems and recipes, an award-winning collection of short stories (One Foot in Heaven), and four books of non-fiction. In 2007, a murder mystery (Fear of Landing, Poisoned Pen Press), a book about diseases people get from animals (The Chickens Fight Back, Greystone Books), and a second edition of Food, Sex and Salmonella (Greystone) will be released. See his book page for more information.
Biography: Born David Toews in Winnipeg, May 29, 1948. Degrees: Goshen College - BA 1971; University of Saskatchewan (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, 1978); University of Guelph (PhD - epidemiology, 1985).
Left Winnipeg as a Canadian Centennial Project in 1967, heading East, which lead him, over eighteen months overland across Europe & Central Asia to India; worked with Mennonite Central Committeee; continued overland through southeast Asia; worked in a sawmill in Vancouver to pay to go to university.
Married Kathy Waltner in 1971, hyphenated name, became the father of two children, studied vet medicine, worked as a country vet in northern Alberta & southern Ontario. After PhD (1985-87) we worked in Indonesia for two years. A professor at the University of Guelph, he specializes in zoonoses (diseases people get from animals (including foodborne diseases), ecosystem health, international development, complexity and post-normal science.
He is a member of the Writers' Union of Canada, Pen Canada, The League of Canadian Poets, the College of Veterinarians of Ontario, the International Society for Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics, the Canadian Society for International Health and the International Association for Ecology & Health. He is Arts & Culture Editor the for international journal EcoHealth.