Conduct research to develop innovative public health interventions
Acquire and apply essential research skills to conduct original research on identifying individual and societal determinants of health behaviors and well-being. Students are trained to design, implement and evaluate theoretically-informed behavioral and structural interventions to reduce health risks and improve quality of life.
Perfect for...
- Students who are passionate about designing interventions to that influence individual and community-level health behavior while aiming to eliminate health disparities
- Students looking for a full-time in-person experience
- Students who want exceptional mentoring advising
- Students who seek to excel as public health leaders
Career Paths
- Public Health Analyst
- Senior Study Director
- Behavioral Epidemiologist
- Senior Research Analyst
- Principal Research Scientist
- Postdoctoral Fellow
- Assistant Scientist
- Assistant Professor
- Director of Healthy Equity Research
- Research & Evaluation Specialist
Program Overview
The doctoral program in Behavioral and Community Health develops public health professionals who are highly skilled in theory-based, community-engaged and anti-racist quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research and can effectively translate research findings to promote and protect well-being.
See all Behavioral and Community Health graduate student resources.
For more information, see the Behavioral and Community Health Flyer.
individually-tailored student
advising is reflected in our 3:1
doctoral student to faculty
advising ratio
- Build emergent themes and sub-themes within qualitative data which require re-reading of text and an iterative process of data aggregation and interpretation;
- Discuss the appropriateness of a variety of statistical techniques to analyze quantitative data;
- Run intermediate-level quantitative statistical techniques using a packaged program;
- Choose major social, behavioral and public health theories to use with the design and evaluation of interventions;
- Apply behavior change theories in the development of research questions and hypotheses, intervention development, evaluation approaches;
- Identify and use mobile/computer apps to gather information or collect data for use in the evaluation of research;
- Manage traditional and new media to communicate health information (e.g., statistics, reports) effectively;
- Build data validation tools to measure behavioral factors that influence community health;
- Write a research proposal for theory-based research;
- Select an appropriate research design;
- Implement all aspects of a secondary data analysis study:
- Conceptualize theoretical framework to be studied;
- Conduct all aspects of single item and multi-item scale variable creation;
- Conduct univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analysis; interpret the results;
- Write a manuscript including introduction, methods, results, conclusions, tables, and figures;
- Develop and communicate a comprehensive evaluation plan for health-related interventions at both the environmental and individual level, including a selection of a sample strategy, evaluation design, and appropriate statistical analyses;
- Apply evidence-based approaches in the development and evaluation of social and behavioral science interventions
Students admitted to the doctoral program in behavioral and community health will complete 78 credit hours of coursework/dissertation research.