Welcome

UConn’s Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy and the Office of Global Affairs is excited to announce the inception of a new 12-credit graduate certificate in interdisciplinary global health offered through the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP) in partnership with Global Affairs.

What is Global Health?

Often associated with epidemiology and pandemic-level health crises, global health refers to an area of research and practice that aims to improve human health worldwide by targeting mechanisms, interventions, and policies that reflect international, transnational, and intranational factors that impact health. Global Health research is highly diverse and interdisciplinary. At its core, global health emphasizes integrating and synthesizing large and population-level preventative strategies with individual-level treatment and clinical practice.

Health domains central to global health include infant and child health, maternal health, sexuality and gender, food security, mental health, infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases, and international development. Global health applies multidisciplinary methodological approaches such as surveys, participatory research methods (practice-based and community-based research), statistical methods, mapping, and randomized control trials to understand global health issues originating from public health, social and behavioral medicine, and social sciences.

Program Goals:

Upon completion of the certificate, students will be able to:

Describe the most important frameworks from the fields of public health, social medicine, and environmental, behavioral, and social sciences that are used to understand global health issues.
Analyze the social, cultural, political, economic, and structural determinants of health, and their effects on access and utilization of quality health services.
Gain familiarity with the complicated history of global health, and its antecedent field of international health.
Gain insight into how power, politics, and structural inequities predispose certain populations to be healthier or sicker than others, and how certain populations benefit from advances in science and medicine while others do no
Apply evidence-based practices to investigate, understand, and interpret global health science.
Gain familiarity with multidisciplinary methodological approaches such as surveys, participatory research methods (practice-based and community-based research), statistical methods, mapping, and randomized control trials to understand global health issues originating from public health, social and behavioral medicine, and social sciences.
Recognize the critical role of interdisciplinary collaboration and capacity building in the development and implementation of interventions, programs, and policies that address global health issues.

Program Requirements

Students are required to take CHIP 5100 (3 credits), plus three additional elective courses (3 credits each) chosen from the courses listed below, as approved by the Global Health Graduate Certificate Committee. Students are allowed, but not required, to take one elective course in their home department and one course listed in the Foundational Courses category. The certificate requires completing all four courses while maintaining a GPA of 3.0 or higher in each required course.

Electives courses:

Students are limited to one from this category:

Allied Health: AH5501. International Health

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
Description:Examines international health challenges. Through case studies, other appropriate readings, and individual research students will gain a comprehensive understanding of global health related challenges (medical, economic and cultural), including children's health, women's health, communicable diseases, and non-communicable diseases.

Anthropology: ANTH 5377. Global Health and Anthropology

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
Description:Assessing global morbidity and mortality; global health governance; political economy of global health; health inequities; social determinants of health; syndemics; climate change and health; maternal and child health; nutrition; infectious diseases; and war, trauma, and complex emergencies.

Public Health PUBH 5462. International Health

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
Description:Examines primary health care as a model suited to the health needs of developing nations. Provides a broader understanding of the genesis of illness in developing countries and analyzes the kind of care required to have an impact on these illnesses.

Human Development and Family Sciences: HDFS 5020 Culture, Health and Human Development

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded

DescriptionIntroduction to current interdisciplinary approaches to the study of human development and health in the context of culture. An overview of theoretical approaches; presentations of current research by invited speakers, focusing on how to combine disciplinary perspectives and methods in order to build a new integrative science of health and development across and within cultures.

ANTH 5305

Public Health Sciences: PUBH 5201 Essentials of Social Inequality and Health Disparities

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
DescriptionIntroduction to (a) the extent of health disparities across the US population, (b) how social inequality contributes to health disparities, and (c) why attention to social inequality is essential to the effective practice of clinical medicine and dental medicine. Examination of how society's social, economic, political and cultural institutions are structured and why they perpetuate the unequal distribution of opportunities that systematically limit the life chances and experiences of individuals. A range of social determinants (race/racism, poverty, income inequality, education, environmental conditions, social capital, social cohesion, social mobility, safety/security, criminal justice system) are considered that may influence health, either directly or as pathways for other determinants. Addresses the function of public health assessment, provides students with a conceptual basis for the complementary course, PUBH 5202.

PUBH 5451

Public Health Sciences: PUBH 5451 Maternal and Child Health Policy and Programs

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
DescriptionExamination of maternal and child health (MCH) programs and policy from the past to the present. Children's rights, advocacy and MCH history provide a foundation to understanding the philosophy and importance of MCH. The health and development of children are addressed starting with families and working through each of the developmental cycles: maternal and infant health, preschool, school age, and adolescent health. Topics that are cross- cutting across the MCH spectrum such as health disparities, women's health and international health.

Public Health Sciences: PUBH 5460 Health and Human Rights

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
DescriptionExplores the many ways in which human health and well-being are related to human rights. Human rights are a field of international law which includes major treaties, treaty bodies, and adjudicatory mechanisms. This course will review the ways in which human rights instruments and jurisprudence have addressed health and issues related to health. Students will also study a wide range of substantive public health issues that have a human rights dimension, and consider the ways that human rights are used as advocacy tools to improve the structural environment that shapes the public's health.
SWEL 5385

Agricultural and Resource Economics: ARE 5305 Sustainable Economic Development

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
DescriptionThe role of sustainable economic development of less developed economies. Microeconomic dimensions of agricultural development, food security, agricultural production and supply, foreign assistance, and government programming.

Allied Health Sciences: AH5505. Principles of Sustainability

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
DescriptionProvides students with an understanding of the basic principles of environmental, social, and economic sustainability and will assist students to develop the ability to apply these principles to current issues of sustainability.

Allied Health Sciences: AH 6310 Introduction to Systems Science and Complexity

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: Pre-calculus or higher, and statistics covering topics including regression analysis; instructor consent required.
Grading Basis: Graded
Description: An introduction to the basic concepts and characteristics of complex systems, as well as useful tools to study complex behavioral and social systems (with examples in health), such as social network analysis, system dynamics modeling and agent-based modeling.

Agricultural and Resource Economics: ARE 5311 Applied Econometrics I

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
Description:This course deals with the estimation and inference of statistical parameters that describe the data generating process of a society, the process that cannot be reproduced like in a pure science experimentation. In other words, the data are generated from economic systems of equations that are stochastic, dynamic, and simultaneous. An attempt is made to obtain the best, unbiased, and consistent estimates of the statistical parameters that describe the inherent economic phenomena.

Agricultural and Resource Economics: ARE 5353 Data Ethics and Equity in the Era of Misinformation

2.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
Description:This course will introduce students to issues of ethics and equity in the contemporary practice of data science. The ability to collect, store, process, and analyze ever greater amounts of data offers great opportunities, as well as potential perils. This course will provide examine the ethical implications of data collection, usage, and distribution. Topics will include systematic approaches to assessing ethical issues; privacy and confidentiality; defining research and the responsibilities associated with conducting ethical research; implicit and structural biases in data collection and analysis.

Agricultural and Resource Economics: ARE 5203 Economics Methodology: Praxis and Practice

3.00 credits

Prerequisites: M.S. student in ARE, or ARE major with Senior standing and instructor approval.

Grading Basis: Graded

Description:Philosophical foundations of economics as a science and economic research. Developing skills for planning, performing, reporting, and evaluating economic research. Critical thinking about the research process, reading about and discussing research methodology, analyzing the logic and reasoning of other economists’ research articles, and developing a research project.

Geography: GEOG 5500 Fundamentals of Geographic Information Science

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: None.
Grading Basis: Graded
Description:An introduction to the theory and methods for representing, acquiring, storing, manipulating, displaying, and analyzing geographic features in relation to the surface of the earth.

Geography: GEOG 5530 GIS for Health and Environment

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: Recommended preparation: GEOG 5500.
Grading Basis: Graded
Description:An exploration of how spatial data and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be used to understand and improve human and environmental health.

Human Development and Family Sciences: HDFS 5004 Research Methods in Human Development and Family Sciences II

3.00 credits
Prerequisites: Open to graduate students in Human Development and Family Sciences, others with instructor consent.

Grading Basis: Graded
Description:Advanced family and human development research methods; research design and underlying methodological issues in analyzing interpersonal interaction and developmental processes.

Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP)