Epidemiology (EPIDEMIOL)

Instructor(s): Rosalyn Plotzker, Mike Reid

This course is a practicum in public health and preventive medicine as practiced in state and local public health departments in the Bay Area and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Activities include community-based disease control, surveillance, environmental health, outbreak investigations, health education, etc., and can be tailored to students interests.

Instructor(s): Rosalyn Plotzker

Full-time course in infectious disease ecology based in the Veterinary Public Health and Vector-borne Diseases Sections of the California Department of Health Services. One medical student and one UCD veterinary student will conduct outbreak and field investigations, help to develop public health policy statements and review surveillance data regarding zoonotic and vector-borne diseases of public health significance in California.

Instructor(s): Megie Okumura

This online course guides residents and students through the essential components for writing a clinical research protocol, developed around their own clinical research question. Students attend lectures and small group seminars as well as being given the opportunity for an optional peer review session in the last week of the course. The course will cover research questions, hypotheses, specific aims, study types, sample size estimation, power calculations, and data analysis.

Instructor(s): Leigh Kimberg

Introduction to violence causes, consequences and solutions. Emphasis on health professional's role in the clinic and community. Special consideration of domestic and sexual violence, child abuse, guns, gangs, media, drugs and alcohol, and the justice system.

Instructor(s): Staff

Library research and directed reading under supervision of a member of the faculty.

Instructor(s): Sara Ackerman

Instruction in identifying and resolving common ethical dilemmas that arise in clinical research, how research is regulated, and misconduct in research. This course meets the NIH requirement for training in research ethics.

Instructor(s): Mark Pletcher

A workshop for students to design their own protocol for carrying out a clinical research project. Specific topics are: the research question, study designs, study subjects, measurements, sample size, ethical considerations, presets, data management, quality control, and proposal writing.

Instructor(s): Erin Van Blarigan, Jennifer Smith

An introductory course to the theory and methods of epidemiology, including an overview of the measures of disease occurrence in populations, measures of association between exposures and outcomes, major study designs used in epidemiology, and major sources of bias in epidemiologic studies. It aims to develop participants skills in the critical evaluation of epidemiologic studies, and will provide the foundation for more advanced methods in study design, causal inference, and biostatistics.

Instructor(s): Michael Kohn, Thomas Newman

This is primarily a course about diagnosis and prediction. In public health and clinical practice, diagnostic tests estimate the probability of a prevalent disease, and risk prediction models evaluate the likelihood of an incident outcome. The course will cover: performance measures used for diagnostic tests and risk prediction models; design and critical appraisal of research studies to evaluate tests and risk models; and using the results of tests and risk models.

Instructor(s): Alison Huang, Patrick Phillips

Instruction in experimental design options in clinical research; methods of randomization; blinding; interventions and controls; measuring outcomes and adverse effects; follow-up, compliance and post-randomization problems; ethical issues; and working with pharmaceutical companies.

Instructor(s): June Chan, Rebecca Graff

This course is designed to provide masters and doctoral students in Epidemiology with advanced training in the theory and practice of epidemiology. It focuses on integrating study design methods with advanced causal inference approaches. The lectures focus on practical and theoretical considerations of the observational study designs. The small group discussion meetings will cover examples and applications of the concepts and analytic approaches introduced in the lectures.

Instructor(s): Jacqueline Torres

This course will provide an overview of issues and methods for the study of the epidemiology of aging with a focus on common chronic diseases in older populations. Students will learn how epidemiologic methods can be applied to aging populations with emphasis on translational applications. Researchers in a topic will present their work. A combination of lectures and seminar formats will be used. Students will complete a 10-page paper, present their work in class and participate in discussion.

Instructor(s): Thomas Hoffmann

This course introduces the concepts, principles, & use of molecular and genetic methods in epidemiologic and clinical research. Students will develop a framework for interpreting, assessing & incorporating such measures in their area of research. In particular, students will learn about: common molecular measures available; including such measures into clinical research; and interactions between genes & other exposures.

Instructor(s): Michael Kohn

Instruction in data collection and management for clinical research, including the relational database model, data collection forms, reports, and exports to statistical packages. Specific applications include REDCap and Microsoft Access with the option of exporting to Stata or R. Build SQL statements using the Access query design tool.

Instructor(s): Lydia Zablotska

This series of seminars, beginning in fall and spread over three terms, provides a forum for presenting scholar's projects and for evaluating controversies in clinical research..

Instructor(s): Jeffrey Martin, Thomas Newman, Michael Kohn

These seminars provide a forum for presenting scholar's projects, and for evaluating controversies in clinical research.

Instructor(s): Christine Dehlendorf, Meghan Morris

An introduction to the knowledge and skills needed to conduct high-quality research in diverse human populations with an emphasis on understanding the measurement and influence of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status on health.

Instructor(s): William Brown III

This course is for learners interested in accessing data sources and using informatics tools that are helpful in identifying cohorts, developing research questions, and conducting health disparities research. Topics will include finding, managing, manipulating, mining, and analyzing a variety of data types. Lectures will cover informatics research projects that address health disparities. Learners will gain access to tools and data sources, and there will be hands-on activities.

Instructor(s): Elaine Ku, Alexis Beatty

Students learn about managing relationships with mentors and collaborators, time management, tips on manuscript submissions and the peer review process, preparing for job interviews, professional development, and leading teams effectively.

Instructor(s): Lydia Zablotska

Trainees enrolled in the ATCR program present and critique each others' clinical research projects on an on-going basis throughout the year.

Instructor(s): Anobel Odisho

This course introduces students to concepts, methods, and pitfalls related to the extraction and analysis of data from the Electronic Health Record. The course covers common EHR data structures and vocabularies, using that knowledge to inform clinical study design, and creation of patient cohorts and analytic extracts. We will evaluate both ambulatory and inpatient use cases. The course will pair lectures with labs to allow application of lecture material.

Instructor(s): Raman Khanna, William Brown III

The course will provide an overview of clinical informatics (the application of informatics to deliver health care services), with an emphasis on clinical informatics research and maintaining scientific rigor in implementation, measurement, evaluation, and health equity. Topics will include electronic health records, clinical decision support, data standards and systems, human factors engineering, clinical informatics policy, and the application of artificial intelligence in clinical informatics

Instructor(s): Peter Washington, Leo Liu

The course will provide an overview of artificial intelligence (AI), with a particular emphasis on clinical informatics applications and considerations. Topics covered will include research, maintaining scientific rigor in clinical informatics AI design decisions, evaluation, interpretability, privacy, and fairness/bias.

Instructor(s): Robert Hiatt, Lydia Zablotska, George Sawaya, Thea Tlsty, Erin Van Blarigan, Scarlett Gomez, Karla Kerlikowske, Rebecca Graff

This course is intended for students who already have acquired, or concurrently are acquiring, a basic understanding of the principles and methods of epidemiology, and who now wish to apply this knowledge to the study of the epidemiology of neoplastic diseases. This is a 2-part course that extends over to the spring quarter, beginning with EPIDEMIOL 252A, followed by EPIDEMIOL 252B.

Instructor(s): Ali Mirzazadeh, George Rutherford

This course will focus on the epidemiological methods used in infectious disease, and strategies for their control or elimination. The faculty-facilitated seminars will focus on key readings in the field and will be led by students. The course covers concepts and methods to assess transmissions, pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical control measures, outbreak investigation, and one health approach to fight health issues at the human-animal-environment interface, including zoonotic diseases.

Instructor(s): Erin Van Blarigan, Amy Conroy

This course is designed to provide doctoral students and fellows with training on the preparation of a NIH Fellowship or Career Development Award application in a structured environment. The course will cover funding mechanisms, NIH submission and review procedures, charting out a timeline for writing and assembling all grant components, and writing each component of the grant application.

Instructor(s): Michael Kelsh

This course provides an overview of methods, data sources, and other selected topics in pharmacoepidemiology. Seminar topics include: review of epidemiologic methods and study designs typically used in pharmacoepidemiology, discussions on the use of pharmacoepidemiology in drug safety research, overview of health outcomes and health economics research, and a discussion of ethics and conflicts of interest in pharmacoepidemiology. This course is designed to complement other epidemiology courses.

Instructor(s): Nadia Diamond-Smith

This course will cover basic demographic theory and methods, including population dynamics, fertility, mortality, migration, urbanization, aging, and family structure. The emphasis will be on how and why understanding these factors is important for public health practitioners. This will be accomplished through case studies on public health topics and how understanding certain demographic phenomenon is essential for understanding the disease burden.

Instructor(s): Catie Oldenburg

This course will focus on advanced analytic methods for causal inference and the interpretation of epidemiologic studies for decision making for individual and population health. The course will emphasize causal inference from observational data, and include a focus on data generation processes, specific methodological concepts for epidemiologic studies, and interpretation of data. Examples will draw from diverse fields within epidemiology, including social epidemiology and infectious disease.

Instructor(s): Travis Porco

Introduction to Concepts of mathematical modeling of infectious diseases; topics include branching processes and the basic reproduction number, dynamical systems, and methods for data fitting Including MCMC.

Instructor(s): Patience Afulani, Nadia Diamond-Smith

This is a graduate-level course focused on Reproductive, Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health (RMNCH). The course will cover foundational RMNCH concepts, including providing an overview of selected RMNCH issues in the US and globally, highlighting best practices and innovations in measurement in RMNCH, examining ways in which social determinants influence RMNCH and produce health inequities and evaluating approaches to meet the needs of vulnerable populations.

Instructor(s): Dave Glidden, Pamela Murnane

This seminar is for doctoral students enrolled in the PhD Program in Epidemiology and Translational Science. The seminar is a forum for instruction and discussion of scholarly topics related to advanced study of epidemiology and its applications as well as works in progress by the graduate students.

Instructor(s): Staff

Independent Study in Epidemiology and Translational Science provides opportunities for pre-doctoral students to work with individual faculty on topics tailored to the special interest of the student with individualized readings, learning materials and experiential learning.

Instructor(s): Staff

Two Research (Team) Rotations of one quarter each are required for the PhD degree in Epidemiology and Translational Science. The purpose is to expose the student to every day working environments for epidemiologists to expand their view of the scope of the discipline. The content of a Rotation can be primarily analytic working with an existing dataset or nonanalytic working on the development and implementation of a research project.

Instructor(s): Alexis Beatty, Elaine Ku

For graduate students in the MAS in Clinical Research Program who have successfully completed all required coursework and are in the process of writing their three products required for graduation.

Instructor(s): Dave Glidden

EPI 299D Dissertation Research is required of students working on their dissertations following passing their qualifying examinations. The subject matter depends on the topic of the dissertation.

Instructor(s): Staff

Students in the Masters in Clinical and Epidemiological Research and PhD in Epidemiology and Translational Science programs are required to gain instructional experience (typically in their second year) in one TICR program course. This experience may involve leading a weekly small-group discussion section (10-12 students), holding office hours for students and grading homework assignments and projects. Satisfactory completion of this requirement is required for advancement to degree completion.