Graduate Prerequisites: (SPH PH 717 or SPH EH 730 or SPH EH 731) or consent from instructor. The assessment of exposures is a critical component of environmental and occupational health practice and research. It is also important for determining compliance with health and safety regulations, conducting toxicologic and human health risk assessments, and for testing intervention strategies. This course focuses on the fundamentals of exposure assessment, including concepts and methods of study design, basic monitoring strategies, field data collection, and data analysis and interpretation. Students will review relevant case studies and conduct a field monitoring project in which - working in teams - they develop their own exposure assessment strategy, collect and analyze data, prepare a final report, and present their findings. Projects may be informed by issues of concern within a community, and should be responsive to carefully designed scientific questions. Accomplishing these learning goals may require an out-of-class time commitment. This course advances environmental health science thinking and application in the context of public health, with a focus on hands-on application of exposure assessment through a student-led project, creating connections among basic concepts and methods, practical community-level exposure assessment, and dissemination of public health information through scientific reports and oral presentations. The course presents general principles relevant to the assessment of most environmental exposures and synthesizes practical considerations for conducting exposure assessment. Through discussions of exposure assessment papers from the published literature and analyses of real-world, student-collected exposure data, the course will reinforce the role of environmental health in promoting the public’s health.

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