MPH Curriculum

This course provides an introduction to the epidemiological perspective on health and disease. The course emphasizes the principles and methods used to describe and evaluate the patterns of illness in communities and in population subgroups. Methods and research designs used in the investigation of the etiology of infectious and noninfectious disease are presented. Lectures and laboratory examples illustrate a wide range of contemporary health problems.

The course will introduce the profession of public health, the social ecological model, the social determinants of health, and health equity. You will define complex public health problems and build skills to assess root causes of public health problems that impact population needs, assets, and capacities within a community.

Employing an equity lens, you will reflect on your own biases, assumptions, experiences, and exposures. You will be introduced to critical public health challenges across an array of public health domains, including health care services and systems, environmental health, occupational health, and health behavior. You will learn practice-based tools for conducting needs assessments and characterizing public health problems using systems thinking.

This course will introduce concepts, frameworks, and skills for how public health professionals intervene at multiple levels to address critical public health problems of our time, and to improve population health and health equity. Specifically, you will engage in a variety of active learning scenarios, including case discussions, role plays, simulations, and project development and implementation.

This course will provide a foundational skill set for how to effectively leverage action at multiple levels to make meaningful contributions to improve population health. You will be introduced to an array of strategies for action and will practice these public health skills throughout the semester, including emergency management, working in teams, engaging stakeholders, building coalitions, program planning, evaluating policies, health impact analysis, and advocacy.

Throughout the class, you will continue to examine how the public health infrastructure functions across multiple levels of government and the role of evidence, politics, stakeholders, and power in influencing public health action and social change.

This course provides an introduction to the basic principles and applications of statistics as they are applied to problems in clinical and public health settings. Topics include the description and presentation of data, random variables and distributions, descriptive statistics, introduction to probability, estimation, elements of hypothesis testing, and one- and two-sample tests, ANOVA (including repeated measures), non-parametric tests, and an introduction to linear and logistic regression. Lectures, problem sets, and computer output are used to develop these concepts.

In this introductory course, you will become familiar with how public health interventions can be evaluated. Formative, process, and outcome evaluation will be addressed. You will become familiar with commonly used planning tools and data collection methods. By the end of the semester, you will have practiced data collection skills and be able to apply content and conceptual knowledge learned in the course to the development of an evaluation plan.