Message from the Director

“Within Reach of Everyone”

On April 30, 2008 President David Naylor announced the creation of the University of Toronto’s new Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Funded by a generous $20 million gift from Torontonians Paul and Alessandra Dalla Lana, the School is now home to the largest Canadian hub for public health education. 

The new School has over 300 graduate students and offers both masters and doctoral degrees. In addition, we have over 40 postgraduate students in our two Royal College Residency Programs: Community Medicine and Occupational Medicine. The School is also engaged in undergraduate programs, teaching in the Faculty of Medicine, Faculty Arts and Science, Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and Faculty of Dentistry.

The School is organized into seven divisions: Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Global Health, Interdisciplinary, Occupational and Environmental Health, Public Health Policy, and Social and Behavioural Science with offerings in all areas of public health.  

The School is built on a long and rich history of public health research and teaching.  The first generation of the School evolved from the public health movement in the early part of the last century. The Rockefeller Foundation, which encouraged the development of a number of schools of public health throughout the world, supported the establishment of the School of Hygiene at the University of Toronto in 1925-1927. This was the third School supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the first two being the schools of public health at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard. The School of Hygiene served as the major focus of public health professional and academic training in English-speaking Canada. The second generation began in 1975 when the programs from the School of Hygiene were merged with the Departments of Preventive Medicine and Behavioural Science. Faculty of Medicine. The third generation of the School began in 1997 with the merger of the Department of Behavioural Science and the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics into the Department of Public Health Sciences.  In 2008, this department formed the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

We are fortunate to have outstanding collaborators in the public health community who contribute significantly to our teaching, research and service missions.  We welcome students from throughout the world who are committed to public health and want to take advantage of the educational opportunities at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health.