Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Helene Polatajko on being appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Announced by Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada on December 29, Prof. Polatajko was recognized for “significantly advancing the understanding of developmental coordination disorder in children.” Prof. Polatajko is one of 135 appointments to the Order of Canada in 2021.

“Created in 1967, the Order of Canada recognizes outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation…Those who bear the Order’s iconic snowflake insignia have changed our nation’s measure of success and, through the sum of their accomplishments, have helped us build a better Canada.”

Dr. Helene J. Polatajko is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at the University of Toronto. She is a world leader in the field of developmental coordination disorder and in the profession of occupational therapy. Dr. Polatajko’s seminal research on the nature and management of developmental coordination disorder revealed that the dominant sensory-motor hypotheses were not supportable and that the interventions based on these hypotheses were ineffective in improving children’s performance. This body of work spurred a paradigm shift in assessing and treating developmental coordination disorder.

Her work over the past four decades has significantly shaped the education and practice of occupational therapists, the field of rehabilitation, and healthcare more broadly, through her excellence in teaching and curricular development, dedicated mentorship, methodical and rigorous rehabilitation intervention development and research, and acclaimed scholarship in advancing client-centred, occupation-based practice.

In the fields of occupational science and occupational therapy, Dr. Polatajko is a distinguished teacher and scholar in Canada and around the world. Her preeminent and innovative research on cognitive strategies and tireless work teaching and mentoring academics, educators, students, and practitioners established her as a model of exemplary scholarship.

Dr. Polatajko developed and advanced the implementation and evaluation of the Cognitive Orientation to daily Occupational Performance intervention, first with children with developmental coordination disorder, then along with her colleagues and graduate students, across significant diagnostic groups. Under Dr. Polatajko’s leadership, there are now 52 Certified CO-OP instructors located in 16 countries, who can present in 10 different languages. These instructors train local occupational therapists and other rehabilitation health professionals on an ongoing basis to build capacity. She is Co-President of the International Cognitive Approaches Network (ICAN) and remains involved in research with colleagues and students, internationally.

Dr. Polatajko has received numerous  awards in recognition of the international impact of her work. In 1992, she was awarded the Muriel Driver Lectureship, the highest honour in Canada for an occupational therapist, given for sustained service and significant contributions to Canadian occupational therapy. Subsequently, she was inducted into the American Occupational Therapy Foundation Academy of Research (1996), as a Fellow of the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists (2002), a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (2009), a lifetime member of the Ontario Society of Occupational Therapists (2007), and a lifetime member of the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists (2020). In April 2018, she received a Leadership Service Commendation Award from the American Occupational Therapy Foundation and is the only Canadian and one of only two non-Americans to receive this award.

As Professor and Chair of occupational therapy programs at two prominent Canadian universities, Dr. Polatajko has been a model of exemplary scholarship to students and faculty. Upon her recruitment to the University of Toronto in 2000, Dr. Polatajko led the transition from the baccalaureate to the master’s professional entry-level occupational therapy curriculum. This MScOT program was implemented in 2001, incorporating significantly augmented theoretical and research components and becoming the second Canadian program to offer master’s professional entry-level programming for occupational therapy, well in advance of most of the other Canadian occupational therapy programs. She held leadership positions in the Graduate Department of Rehabilitation Science (GDRS) between 2004 and 2015, was instrumental in initiating the doctoral-level research stream in 2006, and in establishing GDRS as an Extra-Departmental Unit, now the Rehabilitation Sciences Institute.