Public Health

专业详情

Some of society’s most pressing problems—gun violence, the opioid epidemic, climate change, obesity, mass incarceration, health and healthcare inequalities across the globe—concern public health. These complex problems and the emergence of novel challenges in the future demand a nimble application of public health knowledge and principles, leveraging the foundations of a liberal arts education in order to achieve solutions. Viable solutions will require cross-sector collaborations and systems-level, policy, and environmental action that will affect the social, political, and economic determinants of health. Necessary for leaders to solve these types of societal problems is a broad set of fundamental set of skills. Critical thinking, analytical, problem-solving, and communications skills are necessary to contextualize these problems historically, philosophically, socially, and culturally, and to conceptualize dynamic needs and evidence-based solutions to key parts of these problems.

Public health is integral to a civil society. The many determinants of population health—from the environmental, social, political, and economic factors that shape rates of disease in human populations to the biological factors that ultimately constitute the corporeal mechanisms for disease in individuals—are complex and intertwined. Moreover, how population health is understood, protected, and promoted, is replete with controversies and tensions that are ripe for intellectual interrogation. As such, population health and its connection to civil society is an inherently interdisciplinary area of inquiry. The health and well-being of human populations brings together numerous disciplines, including but not limited to anthropology, architecture, biology, chemistry, demography, ecology, economics, history, international development, mathematics, political science, psychology, sociology, and statistics.

The special concentration in public health is intended to be a secondary emphasis of study that complements the disciplinary specialization of a major or concentration. The goal for the undergraduate special concentration in public health is to foster critical understanding and analysis of the multiple ways in which population health both shapes and is shaped by civil society, complementing the foundation created by the Core curriculum. At the heart of the special concentration in public health are historical and contemporary issues in population health in the context of an increasingly connected, global, urban, aging, and inequitable world. The key themes of inequality, globalization, urbanization, development, the environment, and aging serve as the framework for the constituent courses in the special concentration in public health.