CLI 8301 Introduction to Epidemiology
'Health professionals who provide clinical care, work in public health or clinical research settings or who educate others, should find the course content particularly relevant. This course will provide a basic understanding of the methods and tools used by epidemiologists to study the health of populations. This course will help the student understand that health is defined very broadly, and the types of questions asked and answered by epidemiologists are infinitely varied. This happens as new health conditions arise (e.g., widespread gastro-intestinal illness, SARS-CoV-2 pandemic), new methods are developed to better elucidate mechanisms by which disease occurs (e.g., enhanced genetic testing mechanisms), previous health conditions take on new importance (e.g., obesity, antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis), or epidemiologic methods are applied to problems in the domain of other disciplines (e.g., violence prevention). This variety makes epidemiology an exciting and useful endeavor.
This course covers all the material and topics typically taken in an introductory course for epidemiology. This course will include basic math: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division skills are necessary. It is important that students understand how to manipulate fractions, exponentiate a number, and take the natural log of a number. Students are advised to review math skills on their own ahead of time.