Graduate Certificate in Public Health

This course will examine public health principles and concepts. It will provide a broad framework for understanding public health’s role in community health, prevention, and medicine. Using the five core public health knowledge areas and the ten essential public health services as a foundation, students will explore public health infrastructure, surveillance, social determinants of health, policy, and emerging issues. In addition, the course will weave public health areas such as chronic disease, infectious disease, environmental health, maternal and child health, and injury into discussions and assignments.

This course is designed to introduce students to the basic principles of epidemiology as they apply to public health practice. Content will include: a historical perspective on epidemiology, descriptive epidemiology, effect measures, study designs, bias, surveillance, and screening for disease. Emphasis will be placed on investigative techniques, epidemiological methodology, and critical thinking about epidemiological studies and data.

This course provides you with an introduction to the procedures used in the summarization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of research data. Topics include sampling, experimentation, measurement, descriptive statistics, correlation, probability, confidence intervals, testing hypotheses, 2-way tables, and simple linear regression. This course is deliberately broad and not intended to give students an in-depth understanding of statistical testing, analysis of categorical data or regression analysis. Rather, its intent is to provide an overview of some of the main areas of statistics and a working knowledge of basic summary statistics, graphs, and simple statistical tests for hypothesis testing. At the end of the course, a student should be able to evaluate simple statistical tests for hypothesis usage in everyday life and their own discipline, especially in relevant research publications; and interact knowledgeably with statisticians in planning, conducting, analyzing and reporting research projects.

Using an ecological approach, health behaviors will be considered within the context of influences on individual behaviors. The course will address the use of behavioral and social science theory to inform the development of health promotion and disease prevention programs, and consider the inherent ethical dilemma involved in planned social and behavioral change efforts.

This course brings together graduate students in public health, education, social work, nutrition, and health informatics to work collaboratively to learn the fundamentals of policy-making as applied to the broad issue of student health in an educational setting. Students work in interprofessional groups to identify the social problem, describe the policy context, map potential policy solutions, and make final recommendations in an individually written policy analysis that incorporates learning from their interprofessional peers. Students will explore the structure and function of government systems as they relate to values-driven policy decisions.

This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to the field of environmental health in a public health context. This course will emphasize the exposure risks, health effects, evaluation, and control of hazards including infectious agents, toxic chemicals, air pollutants, and ionizing radiation. Public health applications are incorporated through a comprehensive key assessment project.