NS 6580 - [Advanced Epidemiology: Theory and Practice]

Fall (offered in even-numbered years only). Next Offered: 2020-2021. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

Prerequisite: BTRY 4110 or equivalent, NS 6520, BTRY 6010, BTRY 6020 . Enrollment limited to: graduate students who have completed all requirements for obtaining a minor in Epidemiology.

S. Mehta.

This course will use a combination of lectures and discussions with 'hands-on' laboratory sessions as a method to learn about nutritional epidemiology. Students should be able to apply the methods learned in this class and gain proficiency in designing, conducting, and analyzing nutritional epidemiology studies. Broadly, the topics that will be covered would guide the design of research projects, and include data management and data analysis as it pertains to nutritional data, errors in nutrition assessment, biomarkers of nutritional status or outcome, methods of energy adjustment, anthropometry, and body composition, CDC and WHO growth charts, propensity scores, genetics and gene-environment interactions in nutritional epidemiology, measurement and analysis of physical activity, translating conceptual models into statistical models and dealing with confounders, mediators, endogenous variables, and multilevel models, working with large samples, and longitudinal analysis for analyzing the relationship between diet and disease.

Course will build:

Cognitive skills - skills for critical thinking and quantitative literacy; visual literacy and analysis; capacity to create knowledge; creative problem solving; reflection on professional practice.
Interpersonal skills - leadership and innovation; teamwork and cooperation; oral and written communication.
Interdependence and social responsibility - sense of community, interdependence, and service; ethics; appreciation of diversity and how concepts of human difference are created; ability to manage diverse and changing social, technological and material environment.

Outcome 1: Critically evaluate the nutrition epidemiology literature.

Outcome 2: Describe and compare common methods of dietary assessment, and understand the nature of nutrient variation in the diet.

Outcome 3: Understand the components of study design in nutrition epidemiology studies, particularly data analysis and interpretation.

Outcome 4: Analyze and interpret gene-environment interactions.

Outcome 5: Select appropriate physical activity indicators and describe common methods of anthropometric assessment.

Outcome 6: Independently construct a nutritional epidemiology question and conduct data analysis to address that question in a dataset (either open-source such as NHANES or a dataset related to their theses).

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