Statistical Methods in Epidemiology: An Introduction.

May 25-June 5, 2009.  This 2 week course was provided to 35 participants and aimed to target site investigators with research potential for advanced trainings and/or sandwich trainings. Students with highest scores and aptitude will be selected for advanced long-term training through the Fogarty AITRP.   The  course consists of 23 didatic modules, 8 exercises, and a hands-on analysis laboratory using STATA.  Trainees are lead physicians from the 9 sites that make up the Adult ACTION Cohort (AACT) study, the Pediatric ACTION Cohort (PACT) study, and the Nigerian HIV-malignancy consortium.  The course introduces epidemiology, emphasizing its methodology and statistical approaches and applications in research and public health.  Areas covered in the course included: Measures of Disease Outcomes, Study Designs (such as Cohort Studies, Case-Control Studies, Randomized Clinical Trials, Cross-section Studies), Measures of Associations, Biases, Confounding and Interaction, Descriptive Statistics, Statistical Inferences, Bivariate Analyses, and Multivariate Analyses.  These knowledge and skills are geared towards application to studies aimed at characterizing HIV treatment outcomes and risk factors associated with HIV-related malignancies.  As part of the course, examples of published case series and population-based studies from Africa, the US and Europe are discussed and analyzed. At the conclusion of the course, students are expected to be able to distinguish between different types of study designs, and their strengths and weaknesses, and select appropriate study designs to address specific research questions. 

• Lead UMD Mentor:  Dr. Manhattan Charurat. 

• Course faculty includes:  Dr. Clement Adebamowo, Dr. John Sorkins, and Modupe Oyegunle.