The course will discuss fundamental concepts of descriptive epidemiology using common epidemiological terminology. Students will conduct an epidemiological analysis of population health data, including the analysis and interpretation of incidence rates, prevalence, attributable risks, relative risks, and odds-ratios, and will be introduced to the main features, advantages and disadvantages of randomized control trials, cross-sectional studies, cohort studies and case control studies will be introduced. The course will present concepts, of and approaches to, causation from an epidemiological perspective and describe and differentiate the concepts of bias, confounding and random error. Students will understand the role of epidemiology and epidemiological thinking to concepts of population health including public health problems such as outbreaks, screening programs, and surveillance.

This is a second level course in epidemiology and focuses on analytic epidemiology and the use of quantitative research methods to answer a range of questions. The course focuses on quantitative research designs, sources of bias and error in research, and ways to design and carry out all aspects of research to minimize biased study results and interpretation.

The course covers the epidemiology of selected chronic diseases/health conditions and their risk factors. Sessions will cover general aspects of chronic disease epidemiology and specific health conditions as examples of chronic disease epidemiology.

This is a doctoral-level course in epidemiology study design and research methods. The primary goal of this course is to foster a fundamental and thorough understanding of the concepts of epidemiologic study design to address a particular research question. It is expected that students will already have learned the basic principles and study designs for epidemiologic query in their prior learning and experience. In this course, these fundamentals will be revisited to deepen and enrich students' knowledge.

This course blends theory and practical knowledge that are crucial to planning, organizing, interpreting, and communicating surveillance information in the context of current public health practice. Broad in scope, this course will discuss the design and evaluation of surveillance systems legal and ethical issues, as well as computerization and other technical challenges related to system implementation. This course will go beyond the surveillance of particular conditions to the basic elements common to the application of surveillance to any type of public health problem.

The course is designed to help students prepare for the written comprehensive exam in epidemiology and will help prepare students to carry out (and supervise) quantitative research studies of the student's own design.

This course is designed to introduce epidemiology students with some background in basic statistical analysis to the principals and methods of categorical data analysis relevant to epidemiological studies, with an emphasis on application and interpretation

This course is focused on epidemiologic methods, with an emphasis on the design and conduct of quantitative studies. The learning outcomes of this course are to extend students' appreciation of the scope-of-content of the epidemiologic toolbox and to deepen their understanding of the methodological challenges in the design of epidemiologic studies for answering a research question, and the practical aspects of carrying out such a study. Inevitably, as we work through two detailed protocols per student, we will dive into the details of several different methodological challenges and thus provide exposure and learning on various epidemiological concepts.

This is a lecture and seminar course for graduate students with a focused interest or thesis topic in the area of cancer epidemiology. At the end of the course, the students are expected to acquire an understanding of current issues and directions in cancer epidemiology including surveillance, prevention, cancer control, and a wide range of research topics; obtain basic knowledge related to risk factors for cancer; be able to identify and obtain data on cancer burden and derive basic cancer statistics globally and in Canada; be able to critically assess a given topic related to cancer epidemiology; and be able to identify a research gap in cancer epidemiology either in prevention or control.

This course covers the basic principles needed for critical appraisal of occupational epidemiological studies. Study design, sources of bias, exposure assessment for epidemiological purposes, evaluation of causation, and the practical challenges of conducting occupational studies in Canada will be emphasized.

The course is designed to build skills and knowledge in three areas: (i) core concepts in infectious diseases (e.g., transmissibility, immunity, pandemics, epidemics); (ii) substantive knowledge of diseases (pathogens, syndromes); and (iii) skills (especially analytical skills) that you may need as a practicing epidemiologist in future.

Although the study of public health is just over a century old, many fundamental practices within it have roots in the earliest human civilizations. These include ensuring access to clean water, managing sewage, and safeguarding the food supply. Together, these endeavors form the basis of sanitation whose tools encompass the application of technological and engineering solutions to uphold public well-being. Through a series of readings and group discussions, this course will trace the history of public health sanitation and examine the relevance of sanitary practice in the context of modern challenges. The topics we will be covering include: drinking water, wastewater, solid waste, and agricultural systems.

Much of both the current and projected future global burden of disease and injury is attributed to environmental sources of exposure or changes in environmental conditions. Environmental epidemiologists have: determined whether increases in adverse health outcomes are attributable to environmental exposures; tracked down etiological linkages between environmental exposures-conditions and health status in particular populations; estimated the attributable burden both in the past and projecting into the future to inform programs and policies; and increasingly, evaluated the impact of policy and program interventions aimed at reducing the environmental burden of disease. This environmental epidemiology course will include each of these activities in environmental epidemiology.

This course will provide students with a comprehensive overview of tobacco and tobacco-related issues from a public health perspective. The course focuses on patterns, determinants and health effects of tobacco use, the causes, impacts, and interventions regarding nicotine addiction, and the prevention of tobacco use.

This course introduces principles of formulating epidemiological, clinical, or public health questions, systematically searching for evidence, and applying it to the question, analyzing, and interpreting the results. Also addressed is the role of evidence in informing public health policy, the application of critical appraisal tools, and the role of bias (including that in studies designs, publication bias, and meta-bias). Particular consideration is given to the meta-analytic methodology of synthesizing evidence in a systematic review.

This course introduces students to the primary conceptual and methodological issues and approaches in the field of social epidemiology. The main intention of the course is to provide students with: a) an opportunity to explore the conceptual foundations for methodological and statistical decision-making in social epidemiological research; and b) an opportunity to explore the methodological and statistical techniques commonly used to answer social epidemiological questions.

As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and the health of people and the health of national economies are similarly inter-related, growing numbers of public and private institutions are recognizing the importance of "global health research." Not only do people cross borders — as migrants, immigrants, or transnationals moving back and forth between countries — but so do health problems and their underlying determinants, gradually eroding national differences in health burdens, threats, and responses to them. Global public health research focuses on the inter-relationships among local, regional, national, and international factors that influence health and on the development of effective interventions and policies that will address these factors.

This course consists of the following components: 1) Student presentations and critiques: Student presentation sessions are structured similar to presentations at a research conference. All faculty and students who attend provide a brief written critique of each presentation, which are passed on to the presenters. 2) Substantive presentations by faculty members: In these sessions faculty members and others describe current research, identify methodological challenges involved in their work, and highlight important new methods or data analytic approaches. 3) Professional development: Professional development sessions are focused on professional experience or skills that are typically not provided in coursework, such as teaching skill development and knowledge translation.

This course provides students with an overview of the theory and applications of advanced quantitative methods in epidemiology. The purpose of the course is to assist students in answering complex etiological research questions in epidemiology. The course includes three modules: 1) introduction to survival analysis; 2) Cox proportional hazards model and competing risk analysis; and 3) multi-state models for event history data.

While the general approach to the measurement and analysis of infectious disease epidemiology is closely related to that used in the study of chronic diseases, several important differences exist. The first of these is transmissibility. As Johann Geisecke writes, "in infectious disease epidemiology a case is also a risk factor" for disease in other population members (Geisecke 2002). The corollary of transmissibility is immunity: disease-susceptible individuals provide the "fuel" necessary for epidemics to occur. Conversely, having sufficient immune individuals in a population can decrease the risk of infection for non-immune individuals too. These fundamental properties of communicable diseases can easily be represented, simulated, and evaluated using mathematical models of communicable diseases. Such models are not only a tool for understanding infectious processes but can also serve as a platform for comparison of the expected effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of communicable disease control strategies. This course will serve as a basic introduction to the mathematical model of infectious diseases. All course materials are rooted in, or derived from, current public health challenges.

Population health encompasses traditional public health and preventive medicine and emphasizes the full range of health determinants affecting the entire population rather than only ill or high-risk individuals. The population health approach integrates the social and biological, the quantitative and qualitative, recognizing the importance of social and cultural factors in practice and research. This course is organized to present the core elements of quantitative methods applied in the measurement of health status and disease burden.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to conceptual issues and analytical approaches to assess causal mediation effects under observational study designs. At the completion of the course students should have developed an understanding of formulating research questions in causal terms, the merits of different statistical approaches to assess mediation, and the theoretical and statistical assumptions behind these approaches. In turn, they will be able to determine the most appropriate approach to assessing mediation, given their data source, available measures and research question.

The modern epidemiologists' toolkit must contain innovative and current methods to address the complexity of both the data and questions that we currently face. The focus of this course is to teach selected topics advanced in epidemiologic methods to address bias. Distinct from a biostatistics course, the course will focus on both design and analytic considerations and include practical applications of the methods using statistical software. In an effort to stay up‐to‐date, the specific content will be revised based on emerging techniques relevant for addressing bias in epidemiologic studies. Overall the course will cover the following domains: propensity methods, inverse probability of treatment weights, and quantitative bias analysis.

This introductory course provides an overview of central concepts and topical issues in genetic epidemiology, providing an overall framework for investigating the role of genetic factors in the etiology of common complex disorders. This course integrates human genetics, biostatistics and epidemiology. The main course objective is to provide the common terminology and fundamental concepts underlying the design and conduct of genetic epidemiologic studies. Advanced and novel genetic epidemiology study designs and methods will not generally be discussed in depth as this goes beyond the scope of the course.

Spatial epidemiology is one of most important branches in Epidemiology to investigate spatial distribution of diseases and related determinants of health. With the development of computer sciences and big data, Geographical Information System (GIS) and geospatial technologies have been widely used in Epidemiology and Public Health issues, such as infectious diseases, air pollution, healthcare accessibility, social behaviors, and health inequality. This is an introductory course for spatial epidemiology regarding basic concepts and methods in spatial data, spatial statistics and models, and GIS tools (e.g., ArcGIS, GeoDa, and R) applied in epidemiological and public health studies.

Building on the foundation in communicable disease epidemiology provided in CHL5412H Communicable Disease Epidemiology, Prevention, and Control, this course will use a case-based approach to expand methodological skills necessary for the measurement, study, and modeling of infectious diseases in public health practice. Public health practice is a fundamentally collaborative discipline, and much of the work performed in this course will be similarly collaborative; the focus will be on hands-on learning and skill building, much of which will take place in small groups and via class participation.

Planetary health is about the relationship between the health of the planet, and the health of people, who ultimately depend on the planet for survival of our species. This course will provide students with a big picture perspective of planetary health, research, policy and practice issues related to it, and the implications and opportunities related to planetary health for public and population health globally. A key theme throughout will be consideration of health and social equity issues and the differential impacts of climate and other environmental changes on populations in light of these issues.

This course will teach students about systematic reviews in general, as well as how to conduct a systematic review. This information will be used by the students to conduct a systematic review in the topic of their choice, with guidance from the course directors. Students will learn to identify which organizations conduct knowledge synthesis; discern individuals who can be involved with the knowledge synthesis team; differentiate between different types of knowledge synthesis, such as systematic reviews and qualitative evidence reviews; distinguish between different types of evidence that can be summarized in a knowledge synthesis; develop a knowledge synthesis question; establish the eligibility criteria for knowledge synthesis; and create a knowledge synthesis protocol.

The time spanning from before conception to birth represents a critical period for both maternal and fetal health, with important implications for later development of chronic medical conditions. Reproductive and perinatal epidemiology is a well-established subspecialty of epidemiology characterized by unique methodological challenges, including time-varying exposures, clustering of units of analysis, and measurement of rare exposures and rare outcomes. This course will examine, in detail, methodological approaches and challenges in reproductive and perinatal epidemiology. Topics will cover design, measurement, and analysis in studies of fecundity and fertility, pregnancy and maternal health, and birth outcomes. Critical evaluation and design of research study proposals are a major focus of this course.

This is a seminar course that is primarily intended for doctoral students from across the university, who are doing thesis work on social conditions and health. Master’s students are permitted to enrol with permission. The purpose is to take on theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues is research on the relationship between social conditions — such as race and racism, socioeconomics, politics, policy and political economy, and so on — and health. This is done by (a) investigating some major critical discourses and issues in the field and, (b) applying these discourses to critical decisions and reflections involved in course participants’ ongoing research. The course is intended to be highly interactive and conversational. It is driven by the desire to provide time and space for people in this field of research, across a range of disciplines, to discuss issues in the field and to learn from each other. The course will involve analysis of scientific papers, in-depth exploration of statistical methods, and analysis of issues students are facing in their research.