Are you fascinated by links among cells, society, and health? Are you interested in championing community health, health equity, social and environmental justice? Then you may wish to prepare for a career in public health at the Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health.
The Zilber School is Wisconsin’s only school of public health accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health. Our highly trained faculty are passionate educators leading research programs and engaging communities to impact an array of emerging and entrenched public health issues. The Zilber School offers both undergraduate (starting spring 2019) and graduate programs that respond to the increasing student and market demand for individuals with degrees in public health.
The Zilber School currently has 27 full-time faculty across the five major public health areas (biostatistics, community and behavioral health promotion, environmental health, epidemiology, and public health policy). Since its founding in 2009, Zilber School faculty have attracted more than $10 million in grants that cover critical research into issues like air pollution and autism, cancer, cardiovascular disease, health disparities, infant mortality, mass incarceration, nutrition, tobacco and e-cigarettes, water health, and more. Our students obtain a highly interdisciplinary education from one of the nation’s top universities for research and community engagement.
About Public Health
Public health is concerned with protecting the health and well-being of entire communities and populations. It is the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health and well-being through the organized efforts of society. Public health also works to eliminate social inequities in health – we address how the advantages and disadvantages that people experience based on their social circumstances influence population health. Whereas medicine mostly treats people once they become sick, those of us working in public health strive to prevent people from getting sick or injured in the first place.
Public health asks:
- What makes some people healthy and others less healthy?
- How can we create a society in which everyone has a chance to thrive?
From conducting scientific research to advocating for policies and educating about health, public health professionals work to ensure conditions in which all people can thrive. These include the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems that shape these conditions of daily life (referred to as social determinants of health). Thus, public health covers a wide range of factors that affect population health and well-being, such as economic and social policies, poverty, environmental hazards, access to quality healthcare, health-promoting behaviors, and genes.
The Zilber School embraces its mission to advance population health, health equity, and social and environmental justice among diverse communities in Milwaukee, the state of Wisconsin, and beyond through education, research, community engagement, and advocacy for health-promoting policies and strategies. We educate current and future public health professionals in the science, practice, critical thinking, and leadership skills necessary to promote population health and reduce health inequities.
Programs
Degree Programs
The Zilber School of Public Health offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs. Undergraduates who do not major in Public Health may still take public health courses to satisfy university general education requirements: PH 101 and PH 306 meet the Social Sciences (SS) GER, and PH 303 meets the Natural Sciences (NS) GER. Our graduate degree programs include four doctoral programs and the Master of Public Health (MPH) degree with five tracks. Please contact applyph@uwm.edu to learn more about our programs.
Undergraduate
Master's
Doctoral
Certificates
Public Health Courses
PH 100 New Student Experience in Public Health
PH 101 Introduction to Public Health
PH 142 Exploring Global Environmental Health
PH 201 Public Health from Cells to Society I
PH 202 Public Health from Cells to Society II
PH 206 Child and Adolescent Health
PH 297 Study Abroad:
PH 302 Health and Disease: Concepts and Contexts
PH 303 Climate Change, the Environment and Human Health
PH 304 Foundations of Epidemiology
PH 306 Adolescent Health & Development
PH 319 Introduction to Health Disparities
PH 327 Foundations for Action in Public Health
PH 345 Green fish, green worms & more: animal models and their applications
PH 346 Environmental Health and Disease
PH 355 Public Health Research Methods I
PH 375 Topics in Public Health:
PH 408 Comparative Health Systems: A Social Determinants Approach
PH 410 True Lies: Consuming and Communicating Quantitative Information
PH 427 Strategies for Action in Public Health
PH 428 Program Implementation & Evaluation for a Healthy Society
PH 455 Public Health Research Methods II
PH 467 History of Scientific Reasoning in Global Public Health and Epidemiology
PH 478 Public Health Research Using Social Media
PH 600 Public Health Integrative Experience (Service Learning)
PH 699 Independent Study
PH 700 Structures of Inequality and Population Health
PH 701 Public Health Principles and Practice
PH 702 Introduction to Biostatistics
PH 703 Environmental Health Sciences
PH 704 Principles and Methods of Epidemiology
PH 705 Principles of Public Health Policy and Administration
PH 706 Perspectives on Community & Behavioral Health
PH 708 Health Systems and Population Health
PH 710 Seminar in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics
PH 711 Intermediate Biostatistics
PH 712 Probability and Statistical Inference
PH 714 Statistical Genetics and Genetic Epidemiology
PH 715 Applied Categorical Data
PH 716 Applied Survival Analysis
PH 717 Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis
PH 718 Data Management and Visualization in R
PH 719 Social Justice in Public Health
PH 720 Special Topics in Biostatistics:
PH 721 Introduction to Translational Bioinformatics
PH 722 An Introduction to Bayesian Statistics
PH 723 Design, Conduct and Analysis of Clinical Trials
PH 725 Theories and Models of Health Behavior
PH 726 Community Health Assessment
PH 727 Program Planning & Implementation in Public Health
PH 728 Program Evaluation in Public Health
PH 729 Survey Research Methods in Public Health
PH 730 Overview of Children with Special Health Care Needs
PH 733 Overview of Qualitative Methods for Public Health
PH 740 Special Topics in Public Health:
PH 741 Environmental Public Health Microbiology
PH 743 Environmental Risk Assessment
PH 745 Developmental Toxicology
PH 750 Seminar in Environmental Health Sciences
PH 752 Public Health and Mental Health
PH 758 Social Epidemiology
PH 759 Intro to Regression for Understanding the SDOH
PH 761 Epidemiology Field Methods
PH 762 Environmental Epidemiology
PH 763 Epidemiology for Equity
PH 768 Cancer Epidemiology
PH 769 Critical Perspectives on Nutritional Epidemiology and the Food System
PH 776 Qualitative Approaches in Public Health Policy
PH 777 Quantitative Research Methods for Public Health Policy
PH 779 Public Health Policymaking and Policy Analysis
PH 780 Seminar in Public Health Policy and Administration
PH 781 Public Health Administration
PH 784 Social and Economic Policy as Health Policy
PH 785 Principles of Public Health Economics
PH 790 Field Experience in Public Health
PH 791 Leadership in Public Health
PH 800 Capstone in Public Health
PH 801 Seminar in Public Health Research
PH 804 Advanced Epidemiology
PH 808 Writing a Federal Grant in the Public Health Sciences
PH 811 Causal Inference
PH 812 Statistical Learning & Data Mining
PH 813 Practice of Biostatistical Consulting
PH 818 Statistical Computing
PH 819 Social and Environmental Justice in Public Health
PH 820 Maternal and Child Health Foundations, Policy and Practice
PH 821 Advanced Survey of Environmental Health
PH 823 Applied Analysis of Binary Outcomes in Public Health Research
PH 826 Principles of Community Intervention Research
PH 827 Research Design in Community and Behavioral Health Promotion
PH 830 Leadership and Advocacy in Maternal and Child Health
PH 831 Community Engagement and Participatory Research Approaches in Public Health
PH 859 Racial/Ethnic Health Disparities in the United States
PH 864 Research Ethics in Epidemiology and Public Health
PH 865 Critical Methodologies for Health Equity Research
PH 868 Epidemiologic Links Between Infectious and Chronic Disease
PH 870 Epidemiology in Health Policy and Advocacy
PH 895 Research and Thesis for MS in Biostatistics
PH 904 Survey of Analytic Methods for Epidemiology
PH 911 Generalized Linear Models
PH 919 Core Seminar in Community and Behavioral Health Promotion
PH 960 Core Doctoral Seminar in Epidemiology
PH 990 Research and Dissertation
PH 999 Independent Study
Name | Rank | Degree | School | Graduate Faculty | Emeritus Faculty |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Amy Harley | Interim Dean/Assoc. Dean/ Associate Professor | PhD, MPH, RD | The Ohio State University | Yes | No |
Amy Kalkbrenner | Associate Professor | PhD, MPH | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Yes | No |
Chiang-Ching (Spencer) Huang | Associate Professor | PhD | University of Michigan | Yes | No |
Elise Papke | Special Senior Lecturer | DrPH | University of Illinois Chicago | No | No |
Ellen Velie | Professor | PhD | University of California at Berkeley | Yes | No |
Emmanuel Ngui | Associate Professor | DrPH, MSc | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Yes | No |
Keith Dookeran | Associate Visiting Professor | PhD, MBA, MD | University of Illinois Chicago | No | No |
Kurt Svoboda | Associate Professor | PhD | S.U.N.Y at Stony Brook | Yes | No |
Lance Weinhardt | Associate Professor | PhD | Syracuse University | Yes | No |
Linnea Laestadius | Associate Professor | PhD, MPP | Johns Hopkins University | Yes | No |
Lorraine Halinka Malcoe | Associate Professor | PhD, MPH | University of California at Berkeley | Yes | No |
Meng Xiong | Assistant Visiting Professor | MPH, ABD | The George Washington University | No | No |
Michael Laiosa | Associate Professor | PhD | State University of New York, Upstate Medical University | Yes | No |
Musa Yahaya | Teaching Faculty II | PhD | Southern Illinois University Carbondale | No | No |
Nour Taha | Lecturer | MS | Suffolk University | No | No |
Paul Florsheim | Professor | PhD | Northwestern University | Yes | No |
Phuong (Phoenix) D. Do | Associate Professor | PhD | The RAND Graduate School | Yes | No |
Renee Scampini | Teaching Faculty II | PhD | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | No | No |
Rose Hennesey Garza | Assistant Visiting Professor | PhD | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | No | No |
Todd Miller | Associate Professor | PhD | University of Maryland | Yes | No |
Xiaobei (Shel-bay) Dong | Assistant Professor | PhD | University of Maryland | Yes | No |
Young Cho | Associate Professor | PhD | University of Illinois Chicago | Yes | No |