Public Health Institute (PHI) Preview Webinars

New this year: Sample a few of our PHI offerings to learn something new or to see if you’d like to sign up for the full class. Webinars are free and open to the public (pre-registration is required).

Maps, Models, and Networks: Demystifying the Jargon Around Infectious Disease Epidemiology with Kelly Searle and Kumi Smith
This course will provide a working knowledge of two of the most widely used—yet poorly understood—methods in infectious disease (ID) research: mathematical modeling and geospatial analysis. The goals of the course are less to master these increasingly popular methods than to become informed consumers of research featuring them. Infectious diseases now regularly dominate global news headlines, particularly whether regarding outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases like zika and, Ebola, or vaccine preventable diseases like measles. Such reports often cite highly technical methods such as transmission models, geospatial analyses, or other methods less familiar to students of classical epidemiology. This course will provide a basic understanding of such methods as they relate to the traditional regression-based methods taught in most epidemiology programs. It will also explore the motivations, basic functions, and limitations of ID methods. Students who complete this course will come away with a working literacy of these methods, justifications for their use, and an awareness of their limitations.

Additional preview webinars include Food Matters: Cook Like Your Life Depends on It with Jennifer Breen on Monday April 22, 12:00-12:45 pm and Fundamentals of Data Exploration and Visualization in R with Julian Wolfson on Friday, April 26, 12:00-12:45 pm.