MIEH698D

Prerequisites: Minimum grade of B- in SPHL602/EPIB610 or permission of instructor. Many public health interventions fall short of their goals because they are developed in piecemeal fashion rather than comprehensively and from a whole-system perspective. Systems science frameworks have been presented as an approach to improve the practice of public health by focusing on component parts of a system in the context of relationships with each other and other systems. The goal of this course is to advance all students' systems science capacity, enabling them to become better consumers of literature and collaborators on interdisciplinary systems science teams. Students will develop their ability to identify and describe the underlying mechanisms of persistent and emerging public health problems such as the opioid epidemic, envrionmental injustices and infectious disease outbreaks using systems frameworks. Instructional methods for this course include lectures, readings, in-class exercises, class participation, oral presentations, and writing assignments. This course will also use AnyLogic (Personal Learning Edition), a free modeling software program, to examine the dynamics of underlying system causal structures and feedbacks.