Co-sponsored by DIMACS and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
This is part of a two-part tutorial. For information about the complementary tutorial on The Foundations of Molecular Genetics for Non-Biologists, click here.
THEME: This tutorial will introduce participants to the language, concepts and methods of epidemiology, with the objective of allowing mathematicians to communicate with epidemiologists, to understand important open questions and difficult technical problems in epidemiology, and to stimulate their own ideas about how areas of mathematics that have to this point not been applied to epidemiology might be brought to bear. The emphasis will not be primarily statistical, although the tutorial will discuss statistics to provide some background on how mathematics is currently used in epidemiology. No prior exposure to statistical methods is assumed.
Special tutorial material will be developed specifically to introduce mathematicians to the terminology and concepts used by epidemiologists to investigate patterns of disease occurrence in populations. Emphasized will be the types of study designs, measures of association and types of systematic and random error that concern current epidemiological practice. Open questions and practical problems that currently do not have good solutions will also be emphasized.