Courses within the Public Health Program

The following are courses currently offered in our MPH program. Please note that this is not a complete listing and special topic courses are available throughout a given semester.

Principles of Epidemiology
This is a methods course that is requisite for health-related fields.  The course is designed primarily to focus on the introduction and application of basic/rudimentary epidemiologic descriptive statistics.  A fundamental understanding of the nature of epidemiologic study as related to human morbidity, mortality, and injury (disability) is provided.  Examples of other topics to be presented include the utility of public health vital statistics, concepts of disease transmission, types of epidemiological studies, and causality.

Quantitative Methods in Public Health
The main goals of the course are to acquaint students with the basic concepts and methods of statistics, their applications, and their interpretation as used in public health. Students will learn basic terminology and its meaning, how to calculate various statistical measures and indices, how to quantify health relationships and how to compute and interpret inferential statistical techniques. Students will also acquire the ability to utilize the statistical software package SPSS as a tool to facilitate the processing, editing, storing, displaying, analysis and interpretation of health research related data.

Introduction to Public Health Administration
This course serves as an introductory survey of management problems facing the administrator of a public health agency. Students synthesize these ideas through a final project that requires development of a proposal for implementing a public health program.

Environmental Health
This course will familiarize the students with current issues and practices in the environmental and occupational health, as well as assessment of the risk of environmental exposures.  It focuses on the chemical and physical environmental factors affecting the health of the community. 

Introduction to Questionnaire Design
This course provides an introduction to the design of questions and questionnaires.  The course will provide an overview of the theoretical and experimental literature related to question and questionnaire design while focusing on the various stages of questionnaire design: initial development, question writing, question testing, pretesting, and questionnaire formatting.  As part of the course, students will learn how to design questionnaires, how to critique questionnaires, and how to interpret answers to survey questions.  At the end of the semester, students will have designed a professional questionnaire. 

Introduction to Social Epidemiology
To course provides an introduction to social epidemiology, a subdiscipline of epidemiology.
Social epidemiology is the branch of epidemiology that considers how social interactions and purposive human activity affect health. As a discipline, social epidemiology explores how society’s innumerable social interactions, past and present, yield differential exposures and thus differences in health outcomes between persons who make up populations.

Biomedical Principles of Public Health
This course provides an overview of the biological foundation underlying priority actions related to public health promotion and disease prevention. It includes a review of current professional literature in preventive medicine/public health promotion. Students will develop critical thinking skills to help them distinguish health information based on scientific inquiry.

Design and Analysis of Health Promotion Interventions
This course is designed to provide you insight into the design, implementation, and evaluation of public health programs.  Topics central to this course include: the theoretical foundations of public health programs; various behavioral, social and environmental determinants of health; and research methods inherent to the design and evaluation of public health programs.  More in-depth description of the topics covered in this class is provided in the course learning objectives section below. 

  
Health Policy in the United States
This seminar involves extensive readings on the development of health policy in the United States, with an emphasis on historical development in the context of the institutional structure of health policy and competing values that shape it. The seminar is designed to help students develop the ability to think about policy interventions as part of a larger social system and to understand and frame arguments from competing perspectives.

Introduction to Health Economics
Introductory survey of issues and concepts of health economics, including models for the production of health and healthcare, theory of insurance, industrial organization of health care, and issues of moral hazard and welfare economics.

Physical Activity and Public Health
Physical inactivity is a major public health problem in the U.S. and in many other countries around the world.  In this course students will be exposed to epidemiological, behavioral, & public health issues relevant to effective promotion of physical activity. The course is appropriate for students training to be practitioners and researchers from a range of disciplines including, but not limited to, exercise science, nutrition, psychology, and public health.

Physical Activity Measurement and Data Analysis
The overall goal of this course is to provide an in-depth coverage of approaches used to measure physical activity behaviors and analyze physical activity data. Through a series of readings, class discussions, and applied exercises, including data analysis exercises using SAS, students will develop knowledge and skills relevant to conducting research studies in which physical activity data is collected and/or analyzed.

Diversity & Health
This course is designed to examine the health status and the politics of representation of the U.S. ethnic minorities (e.g., African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Alaskans, etc.).  Emphasis will be placed on factors that influence health and health related behaviors. The course is intended to provide students with an overview of the historical, political, social and cultural factors related to the health behavior and health status of minority groups in American society. 

International Health
The course is designed to explore the impact of globalization on health while examining the relationships between culture and health promotion/disease prevention issues globally.  Students will analyze the cultural, educational, social, economic, political and environmental impact of health and development in Non-Western contexts.  A multi-disciplinary perspective entailing but not limited to, history, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and public health will be offered by way of reading assignments, didactic instruction, class discussions, and course assignments.

Community Health Assessment
The course provides a comprehensive introduction to the public health function of assessment.
The course provides public health students exposure to techniques for assessing and projecting selected community characteristics and population health status from the viewpoint of community health programming. The course covers both primary and secondary data such as demographic data, healthcare utilization, and survey data.

Independent Study
Students with major interests in specialty areas participate in courses of individual study, research activities or advanced readings with a specified faculty member. 

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