Public Health Core
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SPH PH 510: Essentials of Public Health
Students will gain an understanding of public health as a broad, collective enterprise that seeks to extend the benefits of current biomedical, environmental, social, and behavioral knowledge in ways that maximize its impact on the health status of a population. The course will provide an overview of the public health approach including epidemiology, disease surveillance, sustainable solutions, social determinants of health, and disease prevention. Through active learning, students will learn skills in identifying and addressing an ever expanding list of health problems that call for collective action to protect, promote and improve our nation's health, primarily through preventive strategies. Specific topics will include: food safety, toxics reduction, HIV/AIDS & COVID-19, vaccines, and tobacco control and prevention. PH510 is a requirement for obtaining an undergraduate minor in public health. It is appropriate for undergraduates and others who are not in an SPH degree program. It does not carry degree credit for MPH students. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Ethical Reasoning, Social Inquiry II, Critical Thinking. -
SPH PH 511: Pathogens, Poverty, and Populations: An Introduction to Global Health
This course will introduce students to issues of public health importance in developing countries. For each disease or public health problem considered, the class will explore its epidemiology, natural history, risk factors and contributing causes, and responses of the public health community at local, national, regional, and international levels. The course includes six sections: Core Concepts, Child Health and Nutrition, Infectious Diseases, Women?s Health and HIV/AIDS, Chronic and Non-communicable Diseases, and Concluding Sessions. PH511 is appropriate for undergraduates and others who are not in an SPH degree program. Students who complete PH511 as undergraduates should not also take IH703. -
SPH PH 700: Foundations of Public Health
Effective public health requires expertise from many disciplines, and students in public health sciences need to have a broad foundation of knowledge across these diverse disciplines in order to collaborate effectively with other health professionals. PH700 Foundations of Public Health is an online course designed to provide students with foundational knowledge in the profession and science of public health and factors related to public health. PH700 (0 credits) meets the foundational knowledge criteria (as outlined by CEPH) for all MPH and DrPH students. -
SPH PH 701: Online MPH Launch
Students are introduced to the program's learning platforms, tools, and resources to support their success in an online learning environment. Students learn the foundations of public health, including public health history, its core functions and disciplines and biological and social factors that affect health. -
SPH PH 702: Data, Determinants, and Decision-Making for Health Equity
In this module, students learn about public health approaches for health and health equity, including social determinants of health. Students learn fundamental quantitative skills to analyze, synthesize, and apply data to inform decisions, and improve population health outcomes. Students develop skills in data collection, population health needs assessments, budget and resource management, managing conflict, and leadership. -
SPH PH 703: Policy, Programs and Public Health Communication
In this module, students learn about policymaking, globally, and culture- and context appropriate communication and advocacy strategies to improve health in diverse populations. Students learn to design theory- and evidence-based policies programs and interventions, understand ethics, evidence, and local and global politics in policymaking's, and assess health care and regulatory systems. -
SPH PH 708: Local and Global Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Preparing for Future Pandemics
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has had a major impact on societies across the globe from high-income to low- and middle-income countries. The disease caused by this virus, COVID-19, has caused substantial morbidity and mortality yet many questions remain unanswered. Although there has been a plethora of published data on this disease and the causative agent, the quality of the available data varies widely. Given the importance of this pandemic for global and domestic health, and the way it has changed civilization, there is a need for a high level look at the epidemiology and worldwide impact of COVID-19 while delving into the disease vulnerabilities of certain subpopulations and the health disparities that have been highlighted and aggravated by the disease, and looking to future prevention and control of this disease, and optimizing preparedness and response to any other respiratory disease that might subsequently emerge. -
SPH PH 712: Public Health Response to Emergencies in the United States
This course provides students with the necessary knowledge and skills to understand the public health impacts and roles during emergencies and disasters in the United States. The course will use two recent cases, 2013 Boston marathon bombing and 2009-2010 pandemic flu, to explore the persons, events, decisions, policies, and systems involved in each of the events. Students will apply emergency preparedness skills to analyze preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation operations and to communicate risk effectively. Students will consider the question that plagues governmental authorities and residents alike: ARE WE READY? In the end, students will possess a command over how the public health system can provide essential services and support healthy communities during times of emergency. This is accomplished through a combination of case studies, panel discussions, team activities, tours, and exercises. -
SPH PH 715: Communication and Collaboration for Public Health Leaders
This course prepares students to develop and implement communications strategies. Students will learn how to communicate complex topics in clear and engaging ways to the public, media, elected officials and others outside of the public health discipline. -
SPH PH 717: Quantitative Methods for Public Health
Public health is, at its core, an evidence-based discipline. Evaluating relevant evidence to understand the distribution and determinants of disease across the population and to identify and engage in prevention activities requires the collection, analysis and communication of quantitative information. In this course, students will learn fundamental quantitative skills to evaluate data and make evidence-based decisions as a public health professional. This course will provide students with core training in the conduct and design of epidemiologic studies, basic biostatistical analyses and the use of biostatistical software, and foundational knowledge of exposure and outcome assessment. -
SPH PH 718: Leadership and Management for Public Health
Public health professionals rarely work alone to make anything happen. Thus, the goal of this course is to develop your ability to be a change agent for public health by furthering your abilities to communicate with, engage, and organize others in the pursuit of specific projects and change efforts. While you may not immediately hold a formal leadership position, you can always "lead from where you are" and/or informally by understanding how to effectively and ethically work with others both within and beyond your particular organizational home, and manage processes to achieve specific objectives, in order to advance the health issues that you care about. -
SPH PH 728: Religion, Ethics, and Public Health
This course will introduce students to the health related aspects of a variety of Western and Eastern religious and ethical traditions, health controversies that exist within those traditions, methods that can be used to reconcile public health needs with religious and ethical traditions. Through review of case studies, students will be challenged to harmonize public health priorities with cultural beliefs in a way that best serves the community. For example, we will study the religious and ethical controversy inherent in major public health issues such as exemptions to mandatory vaccination laws, sex education in public schools, statues outlawing female genital cutting, life support withdrawal, determination of death, faith healing, fetal stem cell research and allocation of scarce resources. Ultimately, students will generate a robust conceptual framework, enabling a nuanced approach to some of the most critical topics in the field of public health. -
SPH PH 729: Social Network Analysis for Public Health Research
The overall goal of the course is to provide students with a working knowledge of the basic concepts and measures used to describe and analyze social networks and the ability to understand the results and implications of this body of research. Social network analysis applies graph theory to characterize relationships between networked entities (i.e., people, groups, places, organizations, and/or other units). Social network analysis is used to understand how these relations influence attitudes, beliefs, behaviors; diffusion of ideas and behaviors; the spread of infectious diseases; human mobility patterns; communication and collaborative networks; social media networks; and biological systems, among other things. Although social network analysis has a long history of use in sociology, it is also commonly used in many other scientific disciplines, including anthropology, business, communication, computer science, economics, education, marketing, medicine, public health, political science, psychology, and many others. Within public health, network analysis is commonly applied to the study of social media networks, friendship networks among adolescents, citation and co-authorship networks, road networks, disease transmission networks, risk potential networks (i.e., networks with the potential for disease transmission), networks of gangs or terrorists, global trade networks, genome-wide association networks, phylogenetic networks (i.e., putatively linked infections based on viral sequence similarities), etc. For example, social network analysis can be used to understand the epidemiology of infectious diseases, inform vaccination and quarantine strategies during outbreaks, develop peer-driven interventions to change behavioral norms, employ the use of peer health navigators to find individuals who have dropped out of care and connect them with services, identify new infections via contact tracing, study diffusion of innovations, inform organizational improvements, or develop strategies to provide more coordinated health care services. This course consists of class lectures, group discussions, student presentations, labs, reading materials, and problem sets. Of note, problem sets will include additional higher-level thinking questions which will be mandatory for PhD students and optional for all others taking the class. Data analyses will be conducted using Stata, UCINET and Netdraw software packages. -
SPH PH 737: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for Public Health Decision Making
This course is an introductory level mapping class for a novice Geographic Information Systems (GIS) user, applicable to all public health fields. Topics covered include development of geographical datasets (local, national and global), basic mapping and data analysis, and geographical data presentation. A substantial portion of the course will be devoted to computer lab sessions. The course will use ArcGIS software. -
SPH PH 740: Pharmaceuticals in Public Health: An Introductory Course
This course provides the students with an overview of the role of pharmaceuticals in public health and the basic functions of the pharmaceutical sector in terms of stakeholders,regulations, policies and evaluation. In addition the course has the objective to introduce the students to the pharmaceutical program and provide them with basic knowledge that is necessary to enter other courses. By the end of the course the students will be able to discuss the relevance of pharmaceuticals for public health, identify relevant actors in the pharmaceutical sector and their functions, to identify problems within the pharmaceutical sector that lead to inequity and inefficiencies and the proposal strategies to overcome these problems. -
SPH PH 746: Career P.R.E.P.
This career development course is made up of 6 sessions, each 90 minutes long, designed to give you the tools and techniques to effectively market yourself during the job search process and advance in your career. It will also enable you to research potential career options and to manage your job searches and careers as proactively and effectively as possible. -
SPH PH 747: Using data for decision making
More than ever before, managers need to make sound decisions based on data. Robust dashboards are important tools in this process. Build your Excel "toolbox" by learning and applying useful formulas, graphing and dashboarding techniques, and data analysis in a wide range of real-world case study examples, such as costing of standard treatment guidelines, utilization analysis, and performance dashboards to monitor and evaluate health interventions. Students will have the opportunity to build their own dashboards to apply to a health service challenge, either using a data set of their choosing or one supplied by the instructors. -
SPH PH 750: Essentials of Population Health Research
The goal of this 4-credit course is to introduce students to the data, tools, and methods of population health research. Students will develop the skills necessary to formulate and answer consequential research questions in population health research drawing on theory and methods from epidemiology, biostatistics, and the broader social sciences. Students will prepare an extended research abstract by the end of the semester on a topic of interest in population health research. -
SPH PH 757: Chronic Disease Prevention and Management
Chronic, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and chronic lung disease, are a leading threat to the health of the population. In this course, students will set out to ascertain the background and significance of major chronic diseases affecting population health, and evaluate intervention efforts targeting chronic disease prevention and its long term management. Controversies in current chronic disease prevention efforts will be analyzed. Students are expected to gain skills directly relevant for the development, implementation, and evaluation of interventions directed towards chronic disease prevention and management. -
SPH PH 760: Accelerated Training in Statistical Computing
This class will introduce students to statistical programming in SAS and the conceptual foundations for biostatistical and epidemiologic data analyses, including descriptive statistics, univariate and multivariable regression, and stratified analyses. The course will also introduce students to analysis of qualitative data, predictive and causal modeling, and data visualization. This is a two week intensive course that includes hands-on exercises and projects designed to build skills in statistical computing in population health research.
