Public Health

Why are some groups healthier than others, and how do these differences emerge and persist over the life course? How do social policies (e.g., housing, transportation, employment) relate to health and health inequalities? Why are there health disparities even in countries that have free universal health care?

Students in this course will analyze mental health policies in the U.S.  The class will meet once a week and have an interactive seminar format.  We will approach various topics from both descriptive and analytical perspectives.  Examples of topics include mental health insurance parity, the integration of mental health services and other health services, delivery of services in schools, delivery of services in prisons, and incentives influencing the balance between medication and therapy.

Biostatistical analysis provides the means to identify and verify patterns in this data and to interpret the findings in a public health context. In this course, students will learn the basic steps in analyzing public health data, from initial study design to exploratory data analysis to inferential statistics. Specifically, we will cover descriptive statistics and graphical representations of univariate and multivariate data, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, t-tests, analysis of contingency tables, and simple and multiple linear regression.

This course examines the principles and applications of epigenetics and epigenomics as they relate to human nutrition, environmental exposures and disease etiology. Lectures will address epigenetic mechanisms, environmental epigenomics, and policy implications. Examples and case studies will evaluate these  processes using both animal and human examples drawn from the primary literature. Students will also be introduced to current laboratory methods and emerging technologies for examining epigenetics and epigenomics.