3.0

Average Course Rating

This course explores the concepts, assessment, and control of exposure to biological, physical and chemical hazards in the environment, the risk of adverse health outcomes resulting from such exposures, and the relationship between the exposures and health outcomes. These are placed in the context of the multi-disciplinary scientific field of environmental health as an essential component of the wider field of public health. The course is comprised of lectures, examples, group discussions, and group presentations. The proposed course will fill a gap in content and skill development in the issues and techniques relating to human health risk assessment. This course is targeted toward undergraduates who may not have had any exposure to environmental health science, and provides an introduction to environmental health using the framework of health risk assessment. The course first introduces the concepts of exposure to environmental hazards and biological dose, routes of exposure, statistical characterization of exposure variability in populations, and monitoring networks. The next set of concepts relate to hazard characterization, i.e., adverse health outcomes resulting from such exposures using a variety of types of data including in vitro and in vivo studies, and human epidemiological studies and their strengths and weaknesses. The next segment will deal with the quantitative characterization of the relationship between exposure/dose and the adverse health outcomes, i.e., the dose-response relationships, the metrics used for this, and quantitatively characterizing the health risks of a population. The course will introduce students to several tools including mathematical modeling of exposures and risk, and uncertainty analysis.