MPH Functional Certificate: Environmental Health

The environment—including drinking water, air, food, and housing quality—is a core determinant of population health. The ongoing impacts of climate change highlight the importance of addressing environmental exposures to safeguard health. Health disparities associated with unequal or unjust exposures to chemicals, air pollutants, heat, microorganisms, and noise are a few of the many environmental hazards that must be characterized, assessed, and controlled to reduce the global burden of disease. In this certificate, we examine the complex relationships between environmental exposures and population health.

This 16-unit certificate provides students with tools to evaluate exposure to environmental hazards and their associated health effects and generate strategies to mitigate these exposures and improve health, especially for vulnerable communities. Students collect primary environmental data, learn methods for assessing exposures, gain knowledge of toxicology and physiology, and apply strategies to evaluate and mitigate environmental risk, all of which can inform regulation and policy. Students also have the option to enhance their skills in multiple areas relevant to environmental and public health, including, but not limited to, geographic information systems (GIS), community-based participatory research, and analytical methods relevant to climate mitigation and adaptation.

Upon graduation, students will be able to:

• Collect and analyze environmental data and articulate the characteristics of major chemical, physical, and biological hazards.
• Interpret measured or modeled concentrations or doses of hazards compared with risk-based and non-risk-based criteria and guidelines.
• Evaluate the influence of susceptibility based on a hazards’ biological mode of action, and vulnerability on health risks for major environmental determinants of human disease.
• Identify defensible intervention and prevention strategies to improve health through reduction in exposures to environmental hazards.
• Critically assess literature related to environmental impacts on health, analyzing the strength and validity of the hypothesis, study design and methods, results, conclusions, and public health significance of primary research studies.

Course Requirements

• SPH EH 705 Toxicology for Public Health (2 units) or SPH EH 768 Toxicology for Environmental Health and Epidemiology (4 units)**
• SPH EH 707 Physiology for Public Health (2 units)
• SPH EH 730 Methods in Environmental Health Sciences (4 units)
• One from the following*:
  • SPH EH 757 Environmental Epidemiology (4 units)
  • SPH EH 804 Field Methods in Exposure Science (4 units)
  • SPH EH 866 Risk Assessment Methods (4 units)
• An additional 2–4 units from the courses below*:
  • SPH EH 713 Essentials of Genetic Technologies and the Future of Public Health (4 units)
  • SPH EH 720 Climate Change and Public Health (4 units)
  • SPH EH 722 Climate Change and Health Equity (4 units)
  • SPH EH 727 Incorporating Health to Design Healthy and Sustainable Climate Solutions (4 units)
  • SPH EH 735 Environmental Determinants of Infectious Disease (2 units)
  • SPH EH 745 Wastewater and Health/Sustainable Sanitation (2 units)
  • SPH EH 750 Water Quality (2 units)
  • SPH EH 757 Environmental Epidemiology (4 units)
  • SPH EH 804 Field Methods in Exposure Science (4 units)
  • SPH EH 805 Environmental Health Science, Policy, and Law (4 units)
  • SPH EH 811 Intro GIS for Public Health (4 units)***
  • SPH EH 851 Advanced GIS for Public Health and Climate Research (4 units)
  • SPH EH 866 Risk Assessment Methods (4 units)
  • SPH EH 872 Environmental Data and Exposure Modeling (4 units)
  • SPH PH 737 GIS for PH Decisions (2 units)***
  • SPH PH 802 Environmental Justice: Social Movement, Science and Policy (2 units)
  • SPH PH 803 803 Community-Based Participatory Research: Theory and Methods (2 units)
  • SPH PH 825 Analysis of Emerging Infections Using the One Health Approach (4 units)

*A course cannot satisfy multiple requirement groups.

**Students cannot receive SPH units for both SPH EH 705 and SPH EH 768.

***Students cannot receive SPH units for both SPH EH 811 and SPH PH 737.

Integrative Learning Experience

The ILE involves writing a policy memo for a defined stakeholder group. The student will work on a case study either based on one in a project-based class (e.g., Exposure Assessment, Epidemiology, Risk Assessment, GIS) or an idea developed independently. In either case, the topic must be approved by the certificate director.