Learning Objectives & Goals

  • Develop and implement a research or public health practice project by applying principles of program evaluation or study design, and the application of appropriate data analytic techniques in an area of public health or clinical significance chosen by the student.
  • Develop the knowledge and skills to design, implement, and evaluate epidemiology-related, health services or clinical research projects of clinical or public health significance including:
    1. Employ measures of health and disease status encountered in epidemiologic research, health services research and public health research and practice.
    2. Accurately and effectively employ methods for the design, analysis and interpretation of observational studies including cohort and case-control studies.
    3. Define and recognize issues of exposure and disease risk, time-dependent effects, confounding, and misclassification.
    4. Effectively utilize methods for instrument development, assessment of reliability, validity and responsiveness to change; and/or diagnostic and screening test evaluation.
    5. Apply methods of epidemiology to the study of infectious and non-infectious acute and chronic diseases and their prevention.
  • Develop the knowledge and skills with biostatistical methods and computer software packages (e.g., R or STATA) for performing appropriate crude and adjusted analyses of public health, health services or clinical data, including methods or regression analysis and the ability to formulate a scientific question in terms of a statistical model, leading to quantitative answers.
  • Develop the knowledge and skills with the definitions and basic issues involved in clinical trials including study design, treatment allocation, randomization and stratification, quality control, sample size requirements, patient consent, and interpretation of results. Present for critique and discussion the scientific, policy, and management aspects of clinical trials.
  • Apply the principles of meta-analytic statistical methods for clinical trials and observational studies to quantitatively summarize existing data to answer questions of public health or clinical significance.
  • Understand the development, implementation, and evaluation of guidelines
  • Apply principles of study design and evaluation to T2 research and implementation projects.
  • Demonstrate basic ethics as per responsible conduct of research guidelines.