Colin Whaley, MD MSc

Hi, I’m Colin!

I’m a respirology clinical fellow at the University of Ottawa. I completed my core internal medicine training at the University of Toronto, primarily at Toronto General Hospital. Before that, I earned my MD from McMaster University and an MSc in Pharmacy from the University of Waterloo. My academic interests include health communication, medical education, medical school admissions, health services research, and point-of-care clinical information tools.

My book, Premed Mentor: The Comprehensive Guide to Canadian Medical School Admissions, co-written with Liam Taylor Ralph, is coming in spring 2027 from Brush Education. It’s a guide written entirely for Canadian premeds. It covers everything from planning an undergraduate degree to the MCAT, Casper, essays, interviews, and the provincial residency rules and school-by-school systems that make Canadian admissions different. I wrote it after more than five years of mentoring over 100 applicants, to lower the barriers many of them face in getting reliable admissions information. You can browse free resources now, or sign up for launch updates at premedmentor.ca.

I’m also a researcher with SPARC, the University of Toronto’s Centre for Health Communications at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. SPARC trains clinicians, scientists, and journalists to communicate health clearly and build public trust in a crowded information ecosystem. At SPARC, I lead research projects, including a socioecological framework for physician advocacy published in CMAJ. I also build the digital infrastructure behind the Centre’s learning programs and its community of practice.

I created LungAcademy.com to help respirology trainees learn core pulmonary medicine. It explains history questions and physical exam findings and offers tools for use in clinic and at the bedside. I’m especially interested in how AI can improve care and efficiency.

Building on work I did as an undergraduate, I also gave a TEDx talk on the value of helping older adults use technology.

If we share any interests, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!