Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the MyBU Student Portal for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• 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 704: Applied Methods in Population Health Science
  In this module, students develop both quantitative and qualitative research design and analysis skills to identify and address sources of health inequities. Students develop skills in epidemiologic methods, exposure assessment, health impact assessment, big data management, data visualization and translation, coding and thematic analyses.
• SPH PH 705: Public Health Policy, Advocacy, and Community Organizing
  In this module, students learn strategies to address public health challenges affecting their communities. Students learn to translate knowledge into practice by use of effective communication and education strategies to integrate different perspectives, audiences, and sectors. Students develop skills in stakeholder engagement, public health advocacy, resource-mapping, coalition building, community health organizing, and policy evaluation.
• SPH PH 706: Applied Public Health Practice
  In this practice-based module, students learn to apply research skills in real- world settings to improve health outcomes of individuals, communities, and populations. Students gain real-world experiences in areas such as: community health needs assessments, intervention design, implementation, and cost estimation, and monitoring and evaluation of programs for impact and implementation fidelity.
• SPH PH 707: Integrative Seminar
  In this final capstone module, students demonstrate the skills and knowledge they gained throughout the program in the form of a high-quality written product. Students address the ways that structural bias and social inequities undermine health and they design strategies to communicate evidence-based findings to diverse audiences.
• 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 719: Health Systems, Law, and Policy
  This is a course about who gets what health services, when and how. Policies and laws governing what services are available and on what terms strongly influence health status at both the individual and population levels. This course examines the Constitutional, regulatory, political and socio-economic bases for the policies that determine access, quality, cost and equity in health services and population health programs. While the focus is principally on US examples, the course is structured on the World Health Organization's framework for organizing and analyzing national health systems, covering governance, financing, delivery systems, workforce, and human and other resources. The course combines intensive individual preparation for each class using both written and video materials, interactive class presentations and hands-on individual and group projects in laboratory sessions.
• SPH PH 720: Individual, Community, and Population Health
  This course is intended to provide students with a foundation for future coursework in program design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. It assumes little prior knowledge of determinants of health, and various ways of addressing health problems. It aims to help give students an appreciation of health and the determinants of health at multiple levels in order to gain knowledge and skills necessary to work effectively to improve the health of individuals, communities, and populations.
• 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 731: Analytic Methods and Management Strategies for Public Health Decision Making
  This class provides students with an overview of key analytical approaches often used in decision making related to the environment, climate change and other public health settings. This includes topics such as decision theory, multi-criteria analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, cost-benefit analysis, alternative approaches for assigning values to health outcomes, risk assessment/management, health impact assessment, and sustainability analysis.
• 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 739: Foundations of Infectious Disease for Public Health
  This is a foundational course in infectious diseases for students pursuing a career in public health practice that involves working to control, prevent, eliminate, and/or eradicate these diseases. In the first week of class, students learn basic principles of infectious disease causation and spread. In subsequent weeks, they apply those principles to analyze how agent, host, and environmental (physical, social, behavioral, cultural, economic, political) factors impact the transmission and clinical course of infection, and contribute to the susceptibility and vulnerability of individuals and populations. Students then use this information to analyze the effectiveness of key public health infectious disease control and prevention strategies, and to identify and propose their own intervention strategies. Through a combination of active learning and problem solving, students recognize that addressing infectious disease problems requires consideration of not only the natural history of a disease, but also policy-based decision making, resources and economics, and the ecological, social behavioral and cultural context of disease settings. They learn that designing and implementing contextually appropriate and effective infectious disease control and prevention interventions requires a multi-disciplinary and multi-sectorial, One Health, approach.
• 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.

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