David Waltner-Toews is a Canadian epidemiologist, essayist, poet, fiction writer, and veterinarian. A professor in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph, he is the founding president of Veterinarians without Borders and founding president of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health. He has published half a dozen books of poetry, a collection of poems and recipes, the award-winning collection of short stories, One Foot in Heaven, and the murder mystery Fear of Landing.