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.
Over the past several years, Carlos Avalos has developed research interests in diabetes epidemiology, mental health outcomes, and youth and young adult populations.
Ph.D. in Epidemiology graduate Daniel Amoatika's work focuses on cognitive decline, pharmacoepidemiology, causal inference and the use of real-world data to address public health problems.
William Capell's commitment to practicing medicine grounded in public health has been inspired by his desire to advance population health as well as his direct interactions with patients.
With little historical data on the prevalence of West Nile virus in the state of South Carolina, members of the Delores Marie Thomas Research Lab have assessed its presence in the Palmetto State.
Melissa Nolan, associate professor of epidemiology and director of USC’s Institute for Infectious Disease Translational Research, and Arnold School alumnus Matthew Haldeman have found a rare intestinal parasite that could affect 1 in 20 South Carolinians.
Twenty-five years into her CDC and NIH-funded diabetes and youth research, epidemiology professor Angela Liese and her team continue to increase our understanding of this uniquely vulnerable population.