Examples of Topics Available to Students:

Infectious Disease

Students focus on current methods, concepts, and issues for diseases currently most prevalent in Onondaga County. The student researches their status, epidemiology, methods for control and prevention and barriers to their successful applications. This includes reportability of infectious disease, barriers in reaching hard-to-locate individuals with infectious disease and problems associated with reporting of infectious disease.

The students work intensively with their assigned mentor throughout the course and attend high-level meetings pertaining to their area of interest. Students can also attend conferences, give presentations on their findings, participate in senior staff meetings and discussions addressing approaches to a current community health issue, and attend press conferences for an understanding of communication in the process of, ie, an outbreak.

Diseases that can be researched are, but not limited to:

• Enteric Diseases
• Hepatitis
• Sexually-transmitted Diseases
• HIV/AIDS
• Tuberculosis and Influenza
• Vaccine Preventable Disease
• Emerging Infections
• Bioterrorism and West Nile Virus

Infant Mortality

Students focus on core theories, concepts, methods, and findings in the social epidemiologic field of infant mortality. They will also be able to describe and understand the associations between social class, race and ethnicity, psychosocial factors and community characteristics in the incidence of infant mortality in Onondaga County. Students are involved in meetings, discussions and research covering upstream and downstream factors, covering both policy and current interventional strategies as well as the more proximal behavioral and biological mechanisms which link social and psyschosocial factors to health outcomes.