Penn’s Environmental Health Track offers a curriculum designed for students to master skills in identifying, investigating, ameliorating, and communicating about environmental health risks. Key strengths of this track include the MPH Program’s ability to provide mentored Capstone experiences especially focused on the urban environment and communities with an aging industrial infrastructure such as Philadelphia and its many surrounding communities.
Overall MPH Curricular Goals
The goal of the University of Pennsylvania curriculum in public health is to enable graduates to exercise leadership in:
- Identifying and implementing strategic directions for health policy
- Leveraging and managing resources to promote capacity building and healthy communities and
- Assuring and preserving the health of individuals and their communities
The fourteen course units (14 cu) required for the MPH Environmental Health Track are described below. Environmental health competencies are acquired through meeting the ten course unit (10 cu) core requirements in combination with specific environmental health courses (4 cu).
10.0 cu Core MPH Requirements
PUBH 500 Introduction to Public Health
PUBH 501 Introduction to Biostatistics
PUBH 502 Introduction to Principles and Methods of Epidemiology
PUBH 503 Environmental and Occupational Health
PUBH 504 Behavioral and Social Sciences in Public Health
PUBH 505 Public Health Policy and Administration
PUBH 506 Methods for Public Health Practice
PUBH 507 Ethics, Law and Public Policy
PUBH 508 Capstone (2 cu)
The additional Environmental Health competencies are acquired through the following required courses.
4.0 cu Environmental Health Courses
PUBH 533 Exposure and Safety in the Workplace (1.0 cu)
PUBH 522 Critical Appraisal of Environmental Health Literature (0.5 cu)
PUBH 599 Community-focused Independent Study in Environmental Health (0.5 cu)
OPIM761 Risk Analysis & Management (1.0 cu)
PHRM590 Molecular Toxicology (1.0 cu)
Capstone Culminating Experience Description
The Capstone is an integrating experience required for graduation in the Master of Public Health Program. In two Capstone Seminars, students will have an opportunity to synthesize the knowledge and public health competencies they have acquired through their coursework, apply them to solving public health problems in their area of interest as well as those of their peers, reflect together to learn from each other and from the relevant body of public health experience including the scientific literature, and begin to develop a common grounding and identity as public health professionals. The overall Capstone experience links these two seminars with a mentored project that involves fieldwork in public health. Over the course of the Capstone Experience, students will develop, propose, revise, implement, and present their projects. As their projects successfully come to fruition they will also advise their junior colleagues still in the proposal stage. Students within the Environmental Health Track will be assisted in identifying a practical community-based Capstone experience through the well established network of community partnerships with the Outreach and Education Core of Penn’s Center for Excellence in Environmental Toxicology.