Donald Andrew Dawson (born June 4, 1937) is a Canadian mathematician, specializing in probability.
Dawson received in 1958 his bachelor's degree and in 1959 his master's degree from McGill University and in 1963 his PhD from MIT under Henry McKean with thesis Constructions of Diffusions with Specified Mean Hitting Times and Hitting Probabilities.
From 1996 to 2000 Dawson was the director of the Fields Institute and during these years also an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.
Dawson works on stochastic processes, measure-valued processes, and hierarchical stochastic systems with applications in information systems, genetics, evolutionary biology, and economics.
In 1994 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich with lecture Interaction and hierarchy in measure-valued processes.