Lisa Benz Scott
Graduate Program Director

The Graduate Program in Public Health’s Master of Public Health (M.P.H.) degree program is a small, selective program whose mission is to train individuals who wish to integrate public health knowledge, skills, and values into their careers and provide leadership in the field.

The program emphasizes the population health approach to public health. Achieving and maintaining healthy populations, effectively and efficiently, are central to the population health orientation. Effectiveness and efficiency are particularly acute concerns for public health in today’s world of limited resources and competing agendas. The hallmarks of population health are an ecological understanding of the determinants of health and a systems approach to solving health problems; emphasis on proactively stabilizing and improving health among all populations; and insistence on accountability, evidence-based practice, and continuous performance improvement. The population health approach requires multidisciplinary collaboration among scholars in the social, behavioral, clinical, and basic sciences and the humanities; development of comprehensive, sophisticated health information systems; and use of advanced analytical tools to examine health problems and evaluate responses to them.

The program is designed for persons with an advanced clinical or related degree or currently studying for such a degree, as well as for students who have only a bachelor’s degree. The curriculum is 45 credits and consists of a public health core (24 credits), a practicum, a capstone seminar, and a concentration (15 credits) in Evaluative Sciences, Community Health, or Public Health Practice. In addition, the program offers an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Health Communication in conjunction with the School of Journalism.