A new concentration in public health modeling draws upon a range of faculty expertise and positions the Yale School of Public Health to become a leader in this emerging and increasingly important field.
“It happens that the modeling group here is arguably the best modeling group in the world now,” said Professor A. David Paltiel, director of the concentration. He noted that because of the relative youth of the participating faculty, “Yale could very well be the preeminent place for this sort of important public health policy research for the next 30 years.”
Along with Paltiel, nine other modeling experts from across the school are involved in the interdisciplinary concentration. They include: Theodore Cohen, associate professor; Forrest Crawford, assistant professor; Edward Kaplan, William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management and professor of health policy; Edieal Pinker, professor of management and of health policy; Virginia Pitzer, assistant professor; Jeffrey Townsend, associate professor; Joshua Warren, assistant professor; Daniel Weinberger, assistant professor; and Reza Yaesoubi, assistant professor.
Public health modeling uses mathematical equations and computer simulations to connect data from a set of interrelated systems and processes, including biological, behavioral or social processes, to account for observed patterns in real-world behavior. Modelers seek to determine how these patterns arise and may change over time, which can then help researchers design effective interventions for a variety of public health problems.
In addition to the concentration, the school has Center for Disease Modeling and Analysis, directed by Alison Galvani, the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology. The center uses mathematical modeling to address a range of infectious diseases, including HIV, TB, influenza, rabies and dengue.
Modeling is increasingly taking its place among other, well-established methods for public health research, and can be seen as a “third pillar” alongside analysis of observational data and experimentation, Paltiel said. It comes to the forefront when other, more traditional methods reach the limits of their usefulness, such as when trials are too expensive, will take too long, or if there are ethical concerns to conducting a particular line of research.
Dean Paul Cleary said that modeling is an increasingly important skill for many people who plan to pursue public health careers and the concentration will be a valuable resource for them.
“We are incredibly excited about this cutting-edge program and the skills and insights that it will impart to our students,” he said. “YSPH is fortunate in having numerous faculty in multiple departments who are experts in developing and evaluating such models.”
What makes it so unique here is the fact that it is so easy for us to reach across departmental lines and school boundaries. That’s a tribute to Yale.
A. David Paltiel
The new concentration will burnish Yale’s reputation as one of the leading centers disease modeling, alongside other excellent programs, such as those at Imperial College London and the University of Washington. What sets the Yale modeling group apart from the competition is the breadth of disciplines it encompasses and the inter-departmental collaborative spirit of its faculty.
The affiliated faculty’s expertise spans a range of disciplines that all contribute to understanding the complex mechanisms and systems that drive the health of populations. Pitzer’s background is in disease ecology and epidemiology; Cohen is trained in clinical medicine; Warren’s interest is environmental health and geographic information systems; and Weinberger examines surveillance methodology. Because there is much common ground between modeling and operations research, which originated in the field of business administration, several of the faculty come from that world: Yaesoubi and Pinker do operations research and management science, while Paltiel and Kaplan conduct policy and program evaluation.
Along with Townsend, Crawford will contribute his knowledge of biomath and evolutionary biology. Crawford noted that understanding biostatistics is essential to modeling. It provides the analytical and computational tools to fit models to data, and to quantify the uncertainty in estimated model parameters and predictions.
“With the increasing availability of high-performance computing facilities, modelers and statisticians have been able to construct more realistic models of natural phenomena—such as disease dynamics—and to fit these models to real-world data,” Crawford said. “The modeling concentration will provide M.P.H. students with the skills and experience necessary to contribute to this important and rapidly growing field.”
To complete the concentration, students will take four courses in modeling, complete a summer internship and attend seminars in public health modeling. The first cohort of students will officially enroll in the 2016-2017 academic year. Much of the impetus for the new concentration comes the students themselves, many of whom have expressed increasing interest in incorporating modeling into their methods of research, said Melinda Pettigrew, associate professor and associate dean for academic affairs. One of the goals of the new concentration is to attract an even stronger caliber of student to YSPH. Pettigrew also hopes that new concentration will further the school’s three-part mission of teaching, research and service, and strengthen the school’s reputation, both in the university as a whole, and nationally.
Paltiel said that it is the spirit of collaboration at Yale that makes an interdisciplinary enterprise like the modeling concentration possible. At Yale, he said, “the walls are surprisingly porous … what makes it so unique here is the fact that it is so easy for us to reach across departmental lines and school boundaries. That’s a tribute to Yale.”