Community Exposures and Health Training
Immerse yourself in a two-day intensive course featuring lectures on key concepts in solution-oriented, community environmental health research. Lectures will cover areas ranging from exposure assessment techniques to epidemiologic methods, community engagement practices, health policy applications, and statistical analytic approaches for doing environmental health science that is in partnership with and relevant for improving community health.
Modules/Weeks
Weekly Effort
Discipline
School
Format
Cost
Course Description
The Community Exposures and Health Training is a two-day intensive course featuring seminars and applied analytical sessions on key concepts, exposure assessment techniques, epidemiologic methods, community engagement and health policy applications, and statistical analytic approaches for conducting effective and solution-driven community environmental health research.
- Learn to identify and address socially-patterned health disparities influenced by environmental factors through informed research questions and effective study design.
- Explore sociological constructs and theories integrated with epidemiologic, exposure assessment, and statistical analytic techniques for community environmental health research.
- Acquire skills in conducting solution-driven community environmental health and health disparities research, covering study design, data collection, and analysis methods.
- Engage in hands-on case studies using real-world datasets, applying exposure assessment techniques, epidemiologic methods, and analytic approaches to address key research questions.
To contact support for this course, please email [email protected].
Course Prerequisites
- Basic familiarity with R is recommended to get the most out of the Boot Camp. If you have not used this platform before or need a refresher, step through the tutorials outlined below so you have the basic skills needed for Boot Camp success.
- Each participant is required to have a personal laptop/computer and a free, basic Posit Cloud (formerly RStudio Cloud) account. All lab sessions will be done using Posit Cloud (formerly RStudio Cloud).
What You Will Learn
Numerous studies have documented population differences in adverse health outcomes, ranging from an increased prevalence of asthma, obesity, pregnancy complications, cancer and cardiovascular disease. Research shows that environmental factors, such as water, air, metals, chemicals, food, housing, and geography contribute to these health outcomes. However, training is limited in how to ask informed research questions and design effective studies to evaluate differences in environmental health outcomes. To identify solutions, environmental health scientists must integrate and understand the multi-faceted drivers of environmentally-related diseases. We will address this training gap by coupling multi-disciplinary concepts with the use of appropriate epidemiologic, exposure assessment, and statistical analytic techniques that employ sociological constructs and theories for effective community environmental health research.
This two-day training will provide environmental health scientists with training in community environmental health research. The training’s multi-disciplinary approach will cover the steps involved in conducting informed, effective, and solution-driven community environmental health research. Our team consists of scientists with over 30 years of combined research in the fields of environmental health, sociology, epidemiology, health policy, community engagement, and biostatistics. Lectures will cover key concepts, frameworks, and methods for conducting community environmental health research. We will then build on this knowledge with hands-on learning experiences from case studies that allow participants to apply real-world datasets to address key research questions in environmental health and community health using exposure assessment techniques, epidemiologic methods, community-based participatory research, and analytic approaches, such as interaction and mediation.
By the end of the training, participants will be familiar with the following topics:
- Sociological constructs and theories relevant to environmental health
- Epidemiologic conceptual framework
- Study design advantages and challenges
- Data collection, questionnaire design, and measurement error
- Data analysis: basics of interaction and mediation
- Emerging topics and methods in community environmental health research
Instructors
Joan A. Casey received her doctoral degree from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2014. Dr. Casey is an environmental epidemiologist who focuses on community exposures and health training, and sustainability. Her research uses large secondary health datasets, such as electronic health records, to study the relationship between emerging environmental exposures and population health across the lifecourse. She also considers vulnerable populations, joint social and environmental exposures, and health disparities, particularly in an era of climate change. Dr. Casey investigates a range of exposures including wildfires, power outages, ambient temperature, the built environment, fossil fuel infrastructure, and concentrated animal feeding operations.
Tamarra James-Todd is the Mark and Catherine Winkler Associate Professor of Environmental Reproductive Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. As an epidemiologist, her research takes a three-way approach to studying and improving women's reproductive and long-term health by: 1) evaluating the role of environmental chemicals on adverse maternal health outcomes; 2) assessing racial/ethnic disparities in environmental chemical exposures and adverse health outcomes; and 3) developing pregnancy and postpartum interventions to improve women's chronic disease risk.