Welcome to the Division of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of South Carolina.
What happens to children with diabetes when there isn’t enough food in the household? How can older individuals prevent falls? How can mothers reduce their risk of diabetes in pregnancy? These are some questions that our faculty are seeking to answer.
Epidemiologists design and conduct investigations aimed at improving the health of groups of people by combining knowledge from the social sciences, medicine, biology, the environment, and statistics. Epidemiologic studies provide evidence to inform recommendations for disease prevention, determine optimal treatments, and evaluate the effect of policies. The field is poised to rapidly grow in the future by harnessing developments in genetics, the microbiome, big data, and artificial intelligence to improve health. If you like biology, statistics, and computing, and want to make a difference to the health of large groups of people, epidemiology may be for you.
The Department of Epidemiology has 18 full-time faculty who are passionate about teaching and engaging with students. Students receive rigorous training to design and analyze epidemiologic studies and interpret and report their findings to scientific and public health communities through didactic and practical training. In addition to epidemiologic methods, the curriculum covers applied statistics, data management, and elective courses focused on substantive areas of epidemiology such as nutrition, cardiovascular disease, cancer, clinical trials, maternal and child health, infectious disease, environmental health, and social determinants of health.
Epidemiology is in high demand. Our graduates have taken up positions at top tier universities, the CDC, and the World Health Organization, academia, research, state and federal health departments, hospital systems, pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies, and non-profit organizations.
We offer eight advanced degrees in epidemiology and biostatistics. Each graduate degree has specific application deadlines and requirements.
The Coalition for Excellence in MCH Epidemiology recognized Jihong Liu with the 2024 National Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology Award for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring.
As the program coordinator for Maternal and Child Health training, Mosher helps implement the two major workforce development grants awarded Liu to bolster MCH training and curriculum opportunities at USC.
Danielle Krobath's goal is to prevent and eliminate nutrition-related chronic disease disparities among children and families, and the epidemiology assistant professor has adopted a very broad lens to guide her approach.
2024 has been a banner year for the USC Prevention Research Center, which received its highest funding award to date (nearly $5 million) plus additional funding for two special interest projects.
Enakshi Saha joined the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics to continue her research on tailoring therapy to individual genetic backgrounds. She was attracted to Arnold school's reputation for high-impact research, particularly in the area of health disparities.
During her time in the Ph.D. in Epidemiology program, Xuanxuan Zhu zeroed in on maternal and child health, developing research interests in pediatric epidemiology and physical activity epidemiology.