This course provides an overview of social, personality, and cultural factors influencing behavior. It also addresses stress and related psychosocial factors as determinants of health and disease. Psychosocial and behavior models are discussed. Doctoral students will be required to analyze a specific data set and prepare a research literature report on a specific topic in behavioral and psychosocial epidemiology. A prerequisite for the master¿s students is PHS 505 Principles of Epidemiology.

This course provides an in-depth review of the design, conduct, and evaluation of clinical trials and cohort studies. In addition it addresses errors and common methodological pitfalls using practical illustrations. The first half of the course addresses clinical trials and the second half focuses on other interventional study designs.

This course reviews infectious agents of public health importance. Included are vaccine-preventable infectious diseases; diseases spread by personal contact, water, and food; and arthropod-borne diseases and nosocomial infections. In addition, the emergency preparedness system will be discussed and agents involved in bioterrorism will be addressed regarding treatment and (PHS 702) prevention.

This first half of the course addresses nutritional factors and their relationship to disease. The second half involves a review of genetics, inheritance, and molecular factors causing disease.

This course is designed to provide students with the basic knowledge and skills required to develop and apply epidemiologic principles and concepts to the study of adverse effects of various environmental factors on both human and ecological health. Emphasis is put on the study of the health effects of physical, chemical and biological factors in the external environment, broadly conceived from the epidemiological point of view. As such, it enables students to interpret epidemiological data and understand the approaches used in epidemiological investigations of acute and chronic diseases. The course also covers the basic methods and issues involved in epidemiologic investigations of disease conditions in human populations.