About the course

Epidemiology is not only the major subject of preventive medicine, and also is a fundamental subject of modern medicine. It is a discipline that aims at identifying the distribution and determinants of health-related states or events in specified populations, and the application of this study to control of health problems. Epidemiologic methods were first used to prevent diseases like cholera and measles; today it is used to study genetic, behavioral, and environmental causes of infectious and non-infectious diseases. Epidemiologic methods are used to evaluate the effect of treatments or screening and it is the key subject in the development of "evidence-based medicine".

This course will provide the basic principle and knowledge about the most common types of epidemiologic studies, how they are used, what kinds of bias they may cause and their limitations. We then provided examples of how these methods have been used in public health and clinical research. Although each method has their own characteristics, most methods rely on the same basic set of logical reason. The statistical part of analyzing data was left out; students could read many textbooks on this topic. This section is short and condensed, but students in medical science are trained in absorbing information rapidly. Epidemiology is training in logical thinking rather in memorization and we hope this course will be a pleasant journal into a mindset for later expansion and use.

About the teacher

Jianming Wang, MSc. Ph.D., Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Associate Dean of School of Public Health, Nanjing Medical University.

Dr. Wang got a MSc and a PhD degree from Fudan University in 2004 and 2007, respectively. He also received a MSc degree in International Health from Charite Medical School, Germany in 2007. His main research fields include infectious disease epidemiology, cancer epidemiology, and behavior epidemiology. He has published over 120 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals as the first or corresponding author, and 20 textbooks as the editor or editorial board member.

Email: jmwang@njmu.edu.cn

Tel:+86-15996496360

All materials are contributed by Nanjing Medical University.