Tools for exploring cohort studies, case-control designs, confounding, and outbreak investigation — drawn from MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UNC Chapel Hill, and UW curricula.
Practice mapping public health questions to study designs: pick among cohort study design, case-control study design, and cross-sectional studies for each scenario, justify your choice, name the measure of association produced, and flag one source of selection bias.
Coordinate a local outbreak investigation: draft the case definition, collect exposure histories, build the working line list, compute odds ratios for candidate exposures, and produce a structured final report following standard outbreak investigation conventions.
Track reportable disease cases week over week: compute incidence rates against historical baselines, flag conditions exceeding thresholds, manage open outbreak investigations, and produce the weekly surveillance bulletin — all in one workflow.
Pre-register an observational study analysis on a long-running cohort. Draw the directed acyclic graph, identify the minimal sufficient adjustment set, specify heterogeneity analysis by sex and race, document threats to validity, and produce a time-stamped pre-analysis plan for public registry.
Synthesize epidemiologic evidence for a public health guidance document: classify each study by design, extract measures of association and confounding handling, surface effect modification across studies, and produce the strength-of-evidence grade with dissenting opinions.
