Collaborative Specializations Archives - Dalla Lana School of Public Health

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Collaborative Specializations

Defined as intra-university programs that provide a multidisciplinary experience for students already enrolled in a degree program, the Graduate Department of Public Health Sciences (PHS) participates in a variety of collaborative specializations that provide students with additional options to enhance their degree studies in a wide range of areas. Students can connect around a particular area of focus outside their home graduate unit.

Collaborative specializations are offered to graduate students across the University of Toronto, uniting multiple disciplines to provide a truly unique education experience.

Students in a collaborative specialization must meet all the requirements of their home department in terms of course work, practicum, and/or thesis, in addition to taking the specialized courses of the collaborative program.

Some collaborative specializations are open to students in both the Master’s and Doctoral programs. Please check with the specific specialization for details.

Collaborative Specialization Requirements:

All usual requirements for the degree program in the home department
A thesis topic or practicum placement relevant to the collaborative specialization (depending on the degree requirement)
A thesis supervisor or member of the thesis committee, depending on the specialization, must be appointed to the collaborative specialization
Each specialization has specific course requirements

Collaborative Specializations Sponsored by DLSPH

Addiction Studies

The goal of the Collaborative Specialization in Addiction Studies (CoPAS) at the University of Toronto is to develop and integrate graduate training in the multidisciplinary field of addictions. This field encompasses the use and abuse of alcohol, tobacco and other psychoactive substances, as well as gambling and other addictive behaviours.

Bioethics

The Collaborative Specialization in Bioethics prepares you for specialization in bioethics, with an emphasis on innovative research drawing from themes in the humanities, law, social sciences, natural and health sciences. It offers an enriched interdisciplinary learning experience in bioethics, outside of your home unit’s graduate degree.

Community Development

The Collaborative Masters Specialization in Community Development brings together graduate students and professors from a range of disciplines and professional programs with an interest in community development.

Global Health

The Collaborative Specialization in Global Health (CSGH) is designed to deepen the knowledge base of doctoral students about multidisciplinary approaches to global health issues and challenges, provide career-training related to global health research and practice, and help students develop skills that advance their research.

Health Services and Policy Research

IHPME offers the largest graduate specialization in health services research in English Canada. Health Services Research is offered as a concentration at both the Master of Science and Doctoral level, preparing health services researchers for academic, research and planning positions in both the public and private sectors.

Indigenous Health

The Collaborative Specialization in Indigenous Health provides training in Indigenous health research and practice for graduate students at U of T, while enhancing mutually beneficial relationships with Indigenous peoples, communities and organizations.

Public Health Policy

The Collaborative Specialization in Public Health Policy is a cross-disciplinary specialization providing graduate students with exemplary training program in public health policy. It will give students the capacity to contribute to the development, refinement, and evaluation of policies to address society’s pressing and emerging public health priorities.

Women’s Health

Provides graduate students the opportunity to interact with and be mentored by senior academics engaged in women’s health research, as well as experience employing multidisciplinary approaches necessary to comprehensively examine women’s health and the various biological and social determinants that shape women’s lives and well-being.

Collaborative Specializations in which DLSPH Participates

Aging, Palliative and Supportive Care Across the Life Course

The first aim of the Institute is to conduct applied interdisciplinary research on aging from a life course perspective which sets the Institute apart from most existing centres and institutes on ageing. Using a bio-psycho-social approach, the Institute focuses on the processes of aging and population aging. All of the research is competitive and funded by national bodies in Canada: CIHR, SSHRC, NCE, HRSDC.

Development Policy and Power

Provides a critical and historicized understanding of the nature of some of the main policy debates within the field of development, including: the changing evolution of power dynamics within particular development policy domains over time at the global, national, and local levels of analysis; the role of the power struggles over development policy making and implementation that ensue from these power dynamics; and the ways in which these power struggles pose severe challenges to the institutionalization of policy domains that are equitable and rights oriented.

Environment and Health

The Environment and Health (EH) program complements the collaborative specialization in Environmental Studies while adding a distinct focus on the interplay between the outdoor environment and health status. The health implications of human impacts on the environment cover a very broad range of issues including: air and water quality, contaminated land and shifts in the distribution of vector-borne diseases (related to changes in land-use, climate and human migration).

Food Studies

Food Studies is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding where our food comes from and how it shapes our bodies and identities. The study of food provides both theoretical understanding and practical knowledge for professional careers in health care, business, government service, non-governmental organizations, and educational and community programs.

Human Development

The Collaborative Doctoral Specialization in Human Development (CPHD) is an integrative, transdisciplinary specialization that brings together PhD students from diverse backgrounds to approach human development problems from a holistic perspective. The specialization is structured to facilitate collaboration across academic “silos” and train students to “speak the language” of other disciplines.

Neuroscience

The Collaborative Specialization in Neuroscience is the largest collaborative neuroscience graduate specialization in Canada with more than 380 faculty members and over 270 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, from fifteen academic departments across six faculties at U of T. This large and versatile community provides the strong basis to cultivate a successful training Specialization supporting excellence, collaboration, innovation, and translational and trans-disciplinary research activities.

Resuscitation Sciences

The goal of the Collaborative Specialization in Resuscitation Sciences is to train scientists pursuing research in the optimal care of the acutely ill and injured patient and, ultimately, to create leaders in the discipline who will supervise others providing this level of scientific inquiry. The specialization will appeal to students from a wide variety of backgrounds with an interest in any aspect of resuscitation science.

Sexual Diversity Studies

The Bonham Centre hosts a collaborative graduate specialization in Sexual Diversity Studies at the MA and PhD levels, inaugurated in 2008. This is one of few such specializations anywhere, and builds on the rapid expansion of the SDS undergraduate program, and the faculty research strength at the University of Toronto.

Women and Gender Studies

For the past 40 years, WGSI has trained students to think about the entanglements of gender, race and sexuality. Our teaching and research is distinctive for its transnational feminist approach, critically addressing how national borders, colonialisms, labour, and migration shape life, knowledge, and politics.