text: Administrative issues and Technicalities for Graduate Students | Marc Lipsitch | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
  Administrative issues and Technicalities for Graduate Students
  Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health > Marc Lipsitch > Student/Postdoc Info > Administrative issues and Technicalities for Graduate Students	Administrative issues and Technicalities for Graduate Students
  I work with doctoral and master's degree students at Harvard School of Public Health through two programs, the Department of Epidemiology (Master of Science (SM) and Doctor of Science (SD)), and the Program in Biological Sciences in Public Health (BPH), which grants the PhD. Students wishing to understand more about the distinctions between these programs should begin by reading the information on the program websites. I am also the liaison between the Department of Epidemiology and the Harvard Medical School MD/PhD program, which formally offers an MD/SD in Epidemiology as an option for its accepted students.
  Essentially, the training in the Department of Epidemiology is mainly quantitative, focusing on the design and analysis of studies in human populations on the determinants and of disease incidence and prevalence. Infectious Disease Epidemiology is one area of interest within the Department of Epidemiology; students who apply to the department and indicate an interest in infectious diseases on their application will have their applications reviewed by infectious disease epidemiology faculty and will, if admitted, have one of these faculty as advisors.
  Special epidemiological methods are required to study transmission of infectious diseases, and the Department of Epidemiology offers coursework and research opportunities in this area; these offerings will be expanding as the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics grows. For all diseases, the challenge of epidemiology is to make causal inferences from observational (non-experimental) data, and the HSPH Department of Epidemiology offers excellent coursework in this area as the foundation of the doctoral program. Doctoral research for epidemiology students is invariably quantitative, and while it may involve a laboratory component, that component will likely be to generate data on human (or pathogen) samples that is then analyzed quantitatively, rather than to undertake direct manipulative experiments. In Epidemiology, the typical trajectory is 2 years of nearly full-time coursework ending in a written qualifying exam, after which the student switches to nearly full-time research (perhaps occasional coursework). For MS students, the 2-year MS involves some or all of the same coursework as that for Epidemiology doctoral students, and a short (1 paper) thesis. The 1-year MS, available to students already holding a doctoral degree, has no thesis and half the amount of coursework of the 2-year degree. Admission to the Department of Epidemiology includes assignment to a defined faculty advisor, who is chosen as the one most likely to be a suitable advisor for eventual dissertation research.