General Public Health Concentration Specific Courses

MPH4000 Program Planning (Formerly MPH0014)

Credits: 3 Offered: Fall Cross listed as MHA 1011 Strategy and Program Planning in Health Systems.

Students who successfully complete this course will be able to design an evidence-based and culturally appropriate public health program, in both US and developing country contexts. The course requires quite a bit of small group work in teams of three to develop a final plan for a public health program. The small groups are required to submit four graded assignments and meet with the professor via Zoom four times during the fall term to get feedback. Specifically, students will gain competence in analyzing local needs and resources; developing an evidence-based and technically and programmatically sound causal pathway; articulating program objectives; designing relevant program partnerships and technical components; and designing the program’s monitoring and evaluation plan, implementation plan and budget.

MPH4001 Health Promotion Strategies (Formerly MPH 0216)

Credits: 3 Offered: Spring 2 Health promotion is the practice of educating, equipping, and empowering individuals with the information and resources they need to fight disease. It is the process of empowering people to increase control over their health and its determinants through health literacy efforts and multisectoral action to increase healthy behaviors. This includes activities focused on individual behavior as well as a wide range of social and environmental interventions. Health promotion typically addresses behavioral risk factors such as tobacco use, obesity, diet and physical inactivity, as well as areas of mental health, drugs and alcohol abuse, and sexual health.

Increasingly, lifestyle strategies such as whole food, plant-based diet, exercise, stress management, tobacco and alcohol cessation, and other non-drug modalities are being used to prevent, treat, and reverse chronic disease. This course offers the knowledge and skills recommended by a national panel of representatives from physician and health professional organizations as the basis for providing quality health promotion in lifestyle medicine services.

Topics focus on clinical processes, as well as a review of key modalities: nutrition, physical activity, behavior change, tobacco cessation, managing risky substance use, and stress management / emotional wellness. The course provides basic grounding the field of health promotion and disease prevention via lifestyle medicine and focuses on practice skills for public health professionals.

MPH4002 Environmental & Occupational Epidemiology (Formerly MPH0419)

Credits: 3 Offered: Spring 1 This course focuses on the fundamentals of epidemiological methods specific to environmental and occupational health research. The course will provide students with an insight to appropriate study designs and methodologies to investigate health effects of environmental and occupational exposures in different settings. These include essential concepts involved in generating research hypotheses, as well as environmental and occupational health specific issues such as use of exposure biomarkers, exposure sampling and modeling of exposures, study design issues, confounding and other types of bias, and phenotyping issues as they relate to environmental and occupational factors. We will also review novel data analytic strategies unique to environmental and occupational health (e.g. exposure mixtures), the nascent field of exposomics, and the interpretation of the study findings and public health implications for environmental and occupational epidemiological research. The students will also learn the techniques for critical appraisal of environmental and occupational epidemiological studies. These are achieved through lectures with in-depth discussion of current research status on environmental and occupational epidemiology, readings, homework assignments, mid-term exam, hands-on statistical analysis workshops, and a final project.

Pre-requisites: MPH 1004 (formerly MPH 0400) Introduction to Epidemiology MPH 1002 (formerly MPH 0300) Introduction to Biostatistics

MPH4003 Implementation Science (Formerly MPH0020)

Credits: 3 Offered: Spring 2 This course provides a comprehensive introduction to implementation science—the study of methods and strategies to promote the adoption and integration of evidence-based interventions, practices, and policies in public health and healthcare settings. The course explores foundational theories, models, and frameworks used in implementation research and practice, emphasizing real-world application to bridge the gap between research and effective population health impact. Students will engage with case studies, current literature, and applied exercises to develop the skills necessary to design, evaluate, and sustain implementation strategies across diverse settings and populations.