Admitted Fall 2018 or Later
- Develop novel epidemiological research questions by critically reviewing and evaluating public health literature.
- Use epidemiologic theories of disease causation to conceptualize a general casual framework that captures determinants of disease occurrence.
- Demonstrate proficiency in selecting and conducting the most appropriate study design to address a research question.
- Explain conceptual definitions of exposure variables, outcome variables, mediators, and modifiers in ways consistent with the casual framework guiding the research.
- Identify potential confounders, information bias, and selection bias that distort the validity of a study and ability to minimize them through design, data collection, and analysis.
- Understand required elements to estimate sample size and apply methods to provide valid estimates of parameters for sample size calculations for different study designs.
- Demonstrate skills in public health data collection and management.
- Develop analytic strategies for various study designs, guided by the principles of epidemiology, to account for confounding, interaction effects, and intermediate effects.
- Understand the rationale and assumptions underlying major statistical techniques used to analyze date from epidemiological studies.
- Critically evaluate measures of association (e.g., odds ratio, risk ratio, rate ratio, or hazard ratio) and understand how to select between them for various study designs.
- Demonstrate proficiency in communication skills in reports of findings from research projects (conference presentations, scientific publications, and grant writing).
- Develop expertise in an area of independent research interest.
Admitted Fall 2017 or Earlier
- Critically evaluate social determinants of health.
- Explain predictors and mechanisms of disease or health events.
- Calculate advanced epidemiology measures.
- Critically evaluate measures of association.
- Design, analyze, and evaluate an epidemiologic study.
- Critically appraise epidemiologic literature.
- Demonstrate skills in public health data collection and management.
- Critically evaluate questionnaire and survey instruments.
- Design and evaluate interventions to reduce prevalence of major public health problems.
- Critique the use of meta-analytic statistical techniques.
- Describe and apply statistical approaches to address threats to validity in epidemiologic studies.
- Compare clustered data with traditional epidemiologic data from survey and randomized clinical trials.
- Analyze causal associations.
- Characterize issues associated with missing data.
- Appraise how quantitative and qualitative data can be integrated into mixed methods in epidemiologic research.
- Develop expertise in an area of independent research interest.