Epidemiology for Public Health Specialization

Design and Critique Epidemiological Research. Develop skills that will allow you to conduct and critically assess research in epidemiology

About this Specialization

Thousands of new epidemiological studies are conducted every year and their results can have a profound impact on how we live our lives. Decisions regarding the food you eat, how much you exercise, where you live and what treatment you will follow if you get sick are made based on data from such studies. This specialization aims to equip you with the skills that will allow you to correctly interpret epidemiological research, consider its limitations, and design your own studies.

The first course of the specialization, Measuring Disease in Epidemiology, looks into the main measures used in epidemiology and how these can inform decisions around public health policy, screening, and prevention.

The second course, Study Designs in Epidemiology, provides an overview of the most common study designs, their strengths, and limitations.

The third course, Validity, and Bias in Epidemiology builds on the fundamental concepts taught in the previous courses to discuss bias and confounding and how they might affect study results. It also provides the essential skills to prevent and control bias and confounding and critically think about causality.

At the end of this specialization, you will have gained the essential skills to design and critique epidemiological research and you will be able to pursue more advanced courses in epidemiology. Although this specialization is part of the GMPH programme, it can be taken independently of the GMPH.

Course 1 : Measuring Disease in Epidemiology

Epidemiological research is ubiquitous. Even if you don’t realize it, you come across epidemiological studies and the impact of their findings every single day. You have probably heard that obesity is increasing in high-income countries or that malaria is killing millions of people in low-income countries. It is common knowledge that smoking causes cancer and that physical activity is protective against heart disease. These facts may seem obvious today, but it took decades of epidemiological research to produce the necessary evidence. In this course, you will learn the fundamental tools of epidemiology which are essential to conducting such studies, starting with the measures used to describe the frequency of a disease or health-related condition. You will also learn how to quantify the strength of an association and discuss the distinction between association and causation. In the second half of the course, you will use this knowledge to describe different strategies for prevention, identify strengths and weaknesses of diagnostic tests and consider when a screening programme is appropriate.

Course 2 : Study Designs in Epidemiology

Choosing an appropriate study design is a critical decision that can largely determine whether your study will successfully answer your research question. A quick look at the contents page of a biomedical journal or even at the health news section of a news website is enough to tell you that there are many different ways to conduct epidemiological research. In this course, you will learn about the main epidemiological study designs, including cross-sectional and ecological studies, case-control and cohort studies, as well as the more complex nested case-control and case-cohort designs. The final module is dedicated to randomized controlled trials, which is often considered the optimal study design, especially in clinical research. You will also develop the skills to identify strengths and limitations of the various study designs. By the end of this course, you will be able to choose the most suitable study design considering the research question, the available time, and resources.

Course 3 : Validity and Bias in Epidemiology

Epidemiological studies can provide valuable insights about the frequency of a disease, its potential causes and the effectiveness of available treatments. Selecting an appropriate study design can take you a long way when trying to answer such a question. However, this is by no means enough. A study can yield biased results for many different reasons. This course offers an introduction to some of these factors and provides guidance on how to deal with bias in epidemiological research. In this course, you will learn about the main types of bias and what effect they might have on your study findings. You will then focus on the concept of confounding and you will explore various methods to identify and control for confounding in different study designs. In the last module of this course, we will discuss the phenomenon of effect modification, which is key to understanding and interpreting study results. We will finish the course with a broader discussion of causality in epidemiology and we will highlight how you can utilize all the tools that you have learned to decide whether your findings indicate a true association and if this can be considered causal

Lecturer in Public Health

Filippos Filippidis
School of Public Health

Bio
Dr Filippos Filippidis is a Lecturer in Public Health in the Department of Primary Care and Public Health at the School of Public Health and co-Director of Imperial College’s Master of Public Health. He has studied Medicine and Health Promotion and Education at the University of Athens, in Greece, and has earned an MPH from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, with a focus on Quantitative Methods. His PhD thesis explored the effects of the recent economic crisis in the epidemiology of obesity, smoking, diet and physical activity. His current research focuses on the epidemiology of tobacco use and the evaluation of tobacco control policies in Europe and other regions. He has a keen interest in education; he holds a PG Diploma in University Learning and Teaching and has been teaching Epidemiology at Imperial College and in higher education institutions in Greece for a number of years.

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