Program Leads
Karen Gold MSW, PhD, RSW
Karen is the Curriculum Lead for the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab. Her approach has been shaped by 25+ years as a hospital-based educator, classroom instructor, and clinical social worker. She has led workshops in hospital and community settings, is a certified writing workshop leader, and developed the narrative unit of the Health, Arts and Humanities student certificate at the University of Toronto.
Her PhD dissertation examined clinician writing as autoethnography, and her scholarly interests include illness narratives, poetic inquiry, collaborative practice, and relational ethics. Her chapter on narrative medicine as relational practice was published in the Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice (2020).
Karen is a visual artist and registered social worker/psychotherapist in freelance practice. She lives in Toronto with her family and muses on narrative at Art of the Story.
Damian Tarnopolsky PhD
Damian Tarnopolsky is Creative Lead at the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab (CPD Temerty). He has taught writing to healthcare practitioners at St. Michael’s Hospital and Massey College, co-founded “A Rooster for Asclepius”: The Toronto Health Humanities Writing Group, and is Writer-in-Residence with the Health, Arts and Humanities Program at the University of Toronto.
His fiction has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Journey Prize, and the CBC Literary Award, among others, and his play The Defence won the Voaden Prize. His literary reviews and essays appear in The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere, and he owns and operates an editing company in Toronto named Slingsby and Dixon.
Faculty Disclosure
It is the policy of University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine, Continuing Professional Development to ensure balance, independence, objectivity, and scientific rigor in all its individually accredited or jointly accredited educational programs. Speakers and/or planning committee members, participating in University of Toronto accredited programs, are expected to disclose to the program audience any real or apparent conflict(s) of interest that may have a direct bearing on the subject matter of the continuing education program. This pertains to relationships within the last FIVE (5) years with pharmaceutical companies, biomedical device manufacturers, or other corporations whose products or services are related to the subject matter of the presentation topic. The intent of this policy is not to prevent a speaker with a potential conflict of interest from making a presentation. It is merely intended that any potential conflict should be identified openly so that the listeners may form their own judgments about the presentation with the full disclosure of facts. It remains for the audience to determine whether the speaker’s outside interests may reflect a possible bias in either the exposition or the conclusions presented.