Master of Public Health Curriculum

Environmental Health Concentration

The Environmental Health Concentration is designed to enable students to:

• Propose strategies in determining exposure and evaluating risk for selected occupational and environmental hazards.
• Propose engineering, educational, policy and enforcement strategies that reduce occupational and environmental exposure that improve health outcomes in selected populations.
• Critique various literature sources for communicating issues of hazards, practice-based strategies, and environmental justice and equality.
• Develop appropriate methods to identify, characterize and address environmental health issues.
• Critically assess the general mechanisms of toxicity in eliciting a toxic response to various occupational and environmental exposures.

Epidemiology Concentration

The Epidemiology Concentration is designed to enable students to:

• Analyze the basic principles of disease transmission, prevention, and control by applying them to infectious diseases of public health importance.
• Evaluate the factors that increase or decrease the risk of chronic diseases, and analyze the methods by which these factors can be modified.
• Design an observational or experimental study to evaluate the association between an exposure and an outcome, and identify potential sources of confounding, bias, and effect measure modification.
• Formulate and implement multivariable analytic approaches that adjust for confounders and effect measure modifiers, and generate appropriate conclusions.
• Evaluate distributions of disease in terms of geography, population groups, and time, by creating maps, graphs, tables, or other forms of data visualization.

Health Behavior Concentration

The Health Behavior Concentration is designed to enable students to:

• Apply theory to understanding and measuring the multilevel, ecological context of health behavior, focusing on social determinants of behavior and causes of inequities in individual and population health outcomes.
• Demonstrate ability to identify, plan, adapt, implement, and evaluate sustainable evidence-based health promotion and disease prevention programs
• Demonstrate ability to disseminate and communicate health promotion program methods and outcomes to scientific, practitioner, and lay communities.
• Critically examine and interpret evidence in support of health promotion programs and scientific literature to promote evidence-based public health research and practice.
• Describe the complex role of social determinants of health in health outcomes and effectiveness of health interventions and explain strategies to address health disparities in community-based public health work.

Health Systems & Policy Analytics Concentration (on-campus or online)

The Health Systems & Policy Analytics Concentration (offered on-campus or 100 percent online) is designed to enable students to:

• Analyze important sources of population level health data and recognize the advantages and disadvantages of each of them.
• Apply approaches for measuring population health.
• Analyze determinants of health and wellbeing using primary and secondary data sources.
• Evaluate how multiple service delivery and financing systems interact in shaping health and wellbeing on a population level
• Apply a policy analysis framework to examine health policies and the factors that influence policymakers
• Apply analytic tools and methodologies for evaluating the implementation and impact of population health improvement strategies

The course requirements are the same for on-campus and online versions of the MPH with Health Systems & Policy Analytics Concentration. Learn more about the online option.