Donald J. Cohen

In 2002, the Donald J. Cohen and Irving B. Harris Center for Trauma and Disaster Intervention was named at Tel Aviv University to honor Cohen's contributions.

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.

In 2001, The Donald J. Cohen National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative was established "to improve access to care, treatment, and services for children and adolescents exposed to traumatic events and to encourage and promote collaboration between service providers in the field." The Stress Initiative was a bill by Senator Joe Lieberman and approved by both houses of US Congress to amend the Public Health Service Act to recognize Cohen's contributions to victims of violence-related stress.

Cohen became a vice-president of the International Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions (IACAPAP) in 1986, and was president from 1992 to 1998, where his work fostered "international collaborations in research and clinical care". According to the Yale Bulletin, he was proud of his work in helping to promote child psychiatry in Gaza and in creating the Eastern Mediterranean Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions (EMACAPAP), for which he served as chair of the international scientific committee. He served as vice-president of the board of governors of Yale University Press, was an analyst at the Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis, and was a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He held additional chair appointments with the Child Health and Development Institute, the International President of the Telefon Azzuro Foundation in Italy, and Schneider Children's Hospital of Israel. He served on editorial boards in the United States as well as in France, Israel, and Great Britain.

Cohen joined the Yale School of Medicine in 1972. Along with other researchers, he had begun looking at non-psychological (organic) causes for Tourette syndrome (TS) by 1976. Cohen was named the director of the Yale Child Study Center in 1983—a position he held until his death in 2001. In 2000, he was named the Sterling Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Psychology at Yale. At Yale, he studied personality development, TS management, the effects of stress on developing children, and the interplay between genetic and environmental factors in neuropsychiatric disorders.

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".

Donald Jay Cohen (September 5, 1940 – October 2, 2001) was an American 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".