Strategic Plan

Goal 1

Prepare the next generation of public health leaders through rigorous educational programs

1. Enroll a diverse group of high quality students with biological and clinical backgrounds and strong quantitative skills.
2. Ensure that epidemiology courses are contemporary and comprehensive, that the curriculum incorporates problem-based learning into all advanced courses and that the experience includes high quality mentoring of students.
3. To develop and implement cross-departmental programs such as a statistical genetics concentration with the Departments of Human Genetics and Biostatistics.
4. Build and maintain opportunities for experiences in global health and health equity for students.
5. Develop the curriculum in areas such as nutritional epidemiology, infectious diseases epidemiology, the epidemiology of child health, cancer epidemiology, genetic epidemiology and social epidemiology.
6. Integrate into existing courses topics such as life course epidemiology, global health, systems thinking, health disparities and bioinformatics.

Goal 2

Expand knowledge in the field of public health through scientific inquiry and innovation

1. To conduct observational studies and clinical trials that are grounded in a deep understanding of human health and that use state of the art methods to assess exposures and health outcomes at the molecular, physiological, and clinical levels.
2. To increase the efficiency of research by leveraging opportunties to use existing data, including hospital based and insurance records and other data resources such as vital statistics, surveillance, environmental and geopraphic data.
3. Sustain areas of strength, such as cancer, aging, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, reproductive health and public health dynamics.
4. Expand the research program in areas such as infectious disease epidemiology, molecular and genetic epidemiology and prevention.
5. Collaborate with researchers in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health to evaluate the health effects of environmental exposures such as may result from Marcellus Shale drilling and other environmental sources.
6. Integegrate research addressing health across the life span.
7. Continue to increase research portfolio focus on health disparities and global health.
8. Continue and enhance collaborative interactions between the Department of Epidemiology and other departments in the Graduate School of Public Health, other schools at the University of Pittsburgh, other institutions and governmental agencies.
9. Maximize the use of resources (data, biological samples) from existing studies in the Department of Epidemiology

Goal 3

Advance the health of populations through service and through partnerships with regional, national, and global organizations

1. Provide leadership and guidance to the public health community on the integration of health biological research with large health databases to address public health questions.
2. Continue to actively participate in the direction of the Graduate School of Public Health and the University of Pittsburgh
3. Provide a broad range of expertise to communicate and translate research findings to diverse communities and to local, commonwealth, federal, and international agencies.
4. Link the training of epidemiology students with a health-related local or global service learning opportunity.
5. Provide leadership in the scientific community through participation in peer review and on advisory panels.

Goal 4

Secure adequate resources and promote operations effectiveness, so as to enhance the school’s capacity to fulfill its mission

1. Provide contiguous and secure space for the department of Epidemiology program development and expansion including dedicated space for students.
2. Ensure adequate laboratory space and upgrade the equipment in the clinical laboratories for programatic development and expansion in the assessment of molecular pathways for health.
3. Hire key faculty with strong clinical and biological backgrounds in areas such as child health, nutrition, infectious diseases and biomedical informatics.
4. Improve a teaching environment that includes state-of-the-art classrooms, a computer laboratory and a bench-research teaching laboratory.
5. Create a centralized repository for the storage, management and inventory of biological specimens.
6. Create a centralized repository for the storage of student data and analytic programs.
7. Upgrade meeting facilities to state-of-the-art standards including projection equipment and remote meeting capabilities.
8. Secure information technology support for all faculty, students and staff.
9. Desktop support
10. Archiving of study data
11. Access to computing clusters
12. Data management support for studies
13. Public data set access
14. Data security
15. Access to large, shared data resources