EH 586: Advanced Seminar in Climate Change and Health: Research Frontiers, Assessments and Practices
Spring semester, 2 credit hours
Course Description
Building on EH/GH 582, this course offers an advanced examination of climate and health research and solutions. On the research side, this course will use an in-depth climate health impact assessment study to demonstrate scientific premise, study design, data access and processing, research methodology, results visualization and interpretation. On the solutions side, we will unpack the history and current state of play of global and national climate policy while also diving deep into state and local efforts. In addition, we will pursue emerging topics related to climate change research and policy. Throughout the semester, students will work on a project that will contribute to the Georgia Climate Project, a multi-university consortium co-founded by Emory. Through this effort we will apply systems thinking tools to propose strategies and identify stakeholders important for implementing climate solutions.
EH 587: Introduction to satellite remote sensing of the environment and its applications in public health
Spring semester, 3 credit hours
Course Description
Geospatial information collected from satellite remote sensing has become an extremely powerful tool in various fields of environmental and public health science as well as policy making. However, public health researchers usually lack training to benefit from this rapidly evolving technology. This introductory course provides students a broadened view of environmental sciences with satellite remote sensing technologies, and basic skills for geospatial data analysis. It covers the history, major instruments, and capabilities of satellite remote sensing as well as the basic scientific principles behind it. Students will learn (1) the terminology and data products of both land and atmospheric remote sensing such as those from MODIS and Landsat, and (2) the basic strategies and techniques to analyze geospatial data in free (e.g., Echo Reverb, GIOVANNI and HDFView) and professional grade (ENVI and ArcGIS) software packages. Various case studies demonstrate the rapidly increasing applications of satellite remote sensing in air pollution, infectious disease, climate change and other areas related to public health. The final project allows the students to apply satellite data together with other information to solve a problem of their interest.
Please contact Dr. Liu (yang [dot] liu [at] emory [dot] edu) for questions.
EH 590R: R-based quantitative data analysis for environmental health research
Spring semester, 2 credit hours
Course Description
This course offers in-person and online training on data access, processing and modeling techniques commonly used in environmental health research. The goal is to prepare first year MPH students for conducting quantitative data analysis in the summer and during their second year. Topics include household/ambient air quality, environmental epidemiology, climate change, metabolomics, and epigenomics. Basic knowledge in each subject area will be provided via reading materials and pre-recorded lectures. Instructors will lead a discussion to the typical datasets in their actual research projects in an hour lecture, then work with the students on these datasets during a two-hour computer lab session. After this course, the students will be able to (1) perform data extraction and preprocessing, (2) conduct common data analysis, and (3) generate preliminary results. All coding will be taught in R. Standard class computer codes will be archived on Github.