Dr. Cook is the Academic Chair in Critical Care Medicine a clinician-researcher at McMaster University, and holds a CIHR Canada Research Chair in Research Transfer in Intensive Care. She practices critical care medicine at St. Joseph’s Hospital where she supervises clinical trainees, and she also mentors Masters and PhD graduate students in McMaster's Health Research Methodology Program. Dr. Cook is a founding member and 2-term Chair of the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group - the most established and productive research consortium in the field.
Dr. Cook has published over 700 peer-review articles with associated H index of 168. Her multi-method multi-disciplinary research interests include life support technology, prevention of ICU-acquired complications, end-of-life care, and research ethics. She has received numerous national and international awards for her practice, teaching, mentoring and research. She is a prolific, world-renowned scientist, and a pre-eminent critical care scholar. Dr. Cook was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2009), a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (2010), and received the inaugural Distinguished Lecturer Award in Critical Care Sciences from CIHR's Institute of Circulatory and Respiratory Health (2017). Her work on microbiome modification in critical illness using probiotics resulted in a prestigious Killam Fellowship in Health Sciences from the Canadian Council of the Arts (2017).
For her contributions to the improvement of global intensive care procedures, and leadership in the creation of a national network for critical care research, Dr. Cook was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada (2016).