Applying the Numbers: Epidemiology and Biostatistics for a Beginner Audience

Friday, December 13, 2013

9:00 AM-4:00 PM

Registration begins at 8:30 a.m.

In many public health departments and community organizations, data expertise is concentrated in a few key staff, while those responsible for using data for planning and decision making lack basic skills and understanding of biostatistics and epidemiology.  This full day workshop will be for the public health professional seeking an introduction to the application of Biostatistics and Epidemiology in public health practice.  The presentations will be broken up by group activities where the participants will learn the practical application for the course material.

A course at the intermediate level will be offered in February 2014 which will build on the material in the beginner level and cover multivariate analysis, causality, strengths and weaknesses of study design, and confounding and bias.

$40 (included materials and lunch)

Speakers: Edward J. Gracely, PhD; Mary E. Hovinga, PhD, MPH

Learning Objectives

• Distinguish sample and population and explain the concept of sampling variation
• Define and interpret common simple descriptive statistics.
• Read and interpret common graphs and tables.  Recognize good and poor practice in creating them.
• Explain the logic of hypothesis testing in statistics, and some common terminology.
•  Recognize study design strategies and interpret measures of association such as odds ratios and relative risk.
• Recognize and interpret standard measures of disease frequency such as incidence and prevalence.

Who Should Attend

Staff from community based organizations, health educators, nurses, social workers, and other state and local health department personnel.

*Participants should be true beginners.  The intermediate level in February 2014 would be more appropriate for professionals with a background in the subject matter.

Continuing Education

Social Work, Nursing, CHES, and CPH

Speaker Bios:

Edward J. Gracely, PhD
Dr. Ed Gracely received his Ph.D. from Temple University in 1986 and has been a faculty member at Drexel University (or institutions that later merged with Drexel, notably MCP) since then. He has been involved with the School of Public Health almost since its inception, playing a substantial role in the design and implementation of the MD-MPH curriculum and the original statistics and epidemiology blocks in Year-1. He is currently the course director and instructor for the SPH Introduction to Biostatistics course, member of the SPH Educational Coordinating Committee, Chair of the CBMP (Masters project) Oversight Committee, Chair of the Education Strategic Planning Task Group, and member of the Admissions Committee . In addition to his SPH activities, Dr. Gracely also teaches statistics and research design to medical students in the traditional as well as the problem-based learning tracks, gives talks to residents and fellows, provides consultation to researchers in a wide range of basic science and clinical fields, serves on the editorial board of both Pain and Pain Medicine, and has a substantial number of publications reflecting collaborative work with primary researchers. His research interests include the logic of multiple comparisons, statistics education, and ethical philosophy. Dr. Gracely is a member of the American Statistical Association, a friend (and former member) of the ASA's Committee on Human Rights and Scientific Freedom, and the editor of the newsletter for the Section on Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences.

Mary E. Hovinga, PhD, MPH
Mary Hovinga received her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Michigan. Her main areas of research interest include the surveillance and etiology of mental retardation, environmental epidemiology, and the human health effects of heavy metals, PCBs and DDT. Before joining the Drexel School of Public Health, she taught at the UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham) School of Public Health within its Department of Epidemiology, in which she served as Interim Chair, and was twice awarded the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by UAB. Dr. Hovinga was also an Associate Scientist at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. Publications include articles in Public Health Reports, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Public Health Management and Practice.

Contact Information

Eleanor Lippmann
elippmann@drexel.edu