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.
A recent study led by Ph.D. in Epidemiology candidate Marion Howard compared the health outcomes of planned hospital births vs planned community births (i.e., births that were intended to take place at home or at a birthing center).
Master of Public Health in Epidemiology alumna Emma Boswell is the eighth member of the Rural Health Research Center in the last decade to be invited to join the National Rural Health Association's Rural Health Fellows Program.
USC features Jihong Liu's MCH research into the developmental origins of disease – how the mother’s health in pregnancy affects her children’s – as well as how a woman’s experiences during pregnancy can affect her own health for a lifetime.
USC researchers recently reviewed the existing literature on diet-induced inflammation, climate change, and food systems - finding numerous scientific papers focusing on each of these areas but very few that looked at their overlap.
A 2009 alumna of the Master of Health Administration program, Krystal Cooper found her way back to the Arnold School after nearly 10 years with large health care systems.
Delores Marie ("Marie") Thomas only had four years at USC, first as part of the COVID-19 testing group and then as a member of Melissa Nolan's infectious disease laboratory, yet her impact touched every one of the faculty, staff, students and community members she interacted with.