Dr. Deborah Cook practices critical care medicine at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton.  At McMaster University, she is Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics and Academic Chair of Critical Care.  For 3 terms, Dr. Cook has held a Tier One Canada Research Chair in Knowledge Translation in Critical Care from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR).

Dr. Cook collaborates with several CLARITY faculty members advancing research methods, disseminating evidence based practice and mentoring of junior investigators.  She is a Co-Chair of McMaster University’s annual international workshop ‘How to Teach Evidence Based Clinical Practice’. 

Mentorship and Education

For teaching and mentoring excellence, Dr. Cook has received many local, provincial, national and international honours.  Drs. Cook and Meade Co-Chair ACCADEMY (Academy of Critical Care: Development, Evaluation, and Methodology) - a group of Health Research Methods Masters and Doctoral students and clinical research fellows with an interest in critical care.  Monthly ACCADEMY educational meetings have diverse learner-centered curricula focused on course work, thesis challenges, research design, individual and joint projects, and career development. The Canadian Critical Care Trials Group recently established the Deborah J. Cook Mentoring Award in her name.  

Research Interests

Dr. Cook 's multi-method, multi-disciplinary research has informed or changed practice in critical care medicine. Her studies on how to best prevent ICU-acquired complications such as gastrointestinal bleeding, pneumonia, and thrombosis in the ICU have provided key evidence for systematic reviews and guidelines used at the bedside worldwide.  Her analysis of the social determinants and consequences of deploying or discontinuing life support helped to revive humanism at the end of life.  Her methodologic work has advanced the design and implementation of multicenter studies, pilot studies and surveys, and improved the conduct and reporting of randomized trials and meta-analyses.  As one of the first intensivists to complete and cultivate large international investigator-initiated studies, Dr. Cook is a Founder and Past Chair of the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group. 

Scientific Honours

Dr. Cook has received numerous local, national and international awards for her research.  Citations of her systematic reviews and meta-analyses rank in the top 5 critical care investigators internationally. As summarized by the Web of Science recently, her H index is 147.  A Scopus Scientific Citation Analysis documented that from 1996-2011, she was one of the 400 most influential biomedical researchers in the world.  In 2016, Dr. Cook was named an Officer of the Order of Canada for her “contributions to the improvement of global intensive care procedures, and leadership in the creation of a national network for critical care research”. In 2018, she received the Distinguished Lecturer Award from CIHR and the Canadian Critical Care Society.  In 2019, Dr. Cook was honoured with the CIHR Gold Leaf Award for Impact. She was recently inducted as a Fellow into one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific bodies, the Royal Society.  As a scientist, Dr. Cook has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American Thoracic Society in 2013 and Society of Critical Care Medicine in 2021. 

Click here to find Dr Cook's Google Scholar profile.