Donald J. Cohen

Donald Jay Cohen (September 5, 1940 – October 2, 2001) was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and director of the Yale Child Study Center and the Sterling Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Psychology at the Yale School of Medicine. According to the New York Times, he was "known for his scientific work, including fundamental contributions to the understanding of autism, Tourette's syndrome and other illnesses, and for his leadership in bringing together the biological and the psychological approaches to understanding psychiatric disorders in childhood"; his work "reshaped the field of child psychiatry". He was also known as an advocate for social policy, and for his work to promote the interests of children exposed to violence and trauma.

Donald Jay Cohen was born in Chicago, Illinois on September 5, 1940. His father was a businessman. His family says that when he "was five years old he went up to his room to study and never came down". According to his son-in-law and later colleague Andrés Martin, Cohen was an "observant Jew with deep ties to Israel and a lifelong preoccupation with the Holocaust", who described himself as a "Jewish boy of humble origins growing up in Chicago".

Cohen graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy and psychology, and studied philosophy at Cambridge University on a Fulbright fellowship. He obtained his MD in 1966 from Yale School of Medicine, and completed his general and child psychiatry residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center and Children's Hospital, in Boston and Washington, DC. According to The New York Times, Cohen said that "as a student he honed his fund-raising skills working as a copy writer for a mail order catalog, extolling the virtues of women's hats and other merchandise". He was described as "an avid scholar who loved French poetry and German philosophy, as well as science and medicine".

Cohen died in New Haven, Connecticut of ocular melanoma on October 2, 2001 at the age of 61; he was survived by his wife, Phyllis Cohen, a psychoanalyst at the Yale Child Study Center, four children, and five grandchildren, two brothers, and his mother.

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