Courses

SPRC Center faculty and academic staff teach the following undergraduate and medical school courses on chronic disease prevention, and research methods.  

HUMBIO 123: Obesity in America: Clinical and Public Health Implications
Course highlights obesity as an important public health issue requiring interdisciplinary clinical, research and policy approaches. Examines prevalence, predictors, and consequences of obesity and diabetes; explores biological and physiological mechanisms, including genetic and hormonal influences; examines clinical treatments, including medications and surgery; and demonstrates relevance of behavioral health, environmental, economic, health policy, and legal approaches to obesity prevention and control.
 Prerequisite: Human Biology core or consent of instructor. 3 or 4 units, winter quarter (Goldman-Rosas)

HUMBIO 125: Controversies in Women’s Health
Interdisciplinary focus is on the U.S. Topics including: health research; bioethical, legal, and policy issues; scientific and cultural perspectives; social influences; environmental and lifestyle effects on health; issues related to special populations; features guest lecturers and student debates.
Prerequisite: Human Biology core or equivalent, or consent of instructor. 3 units, spring quarter (Stefanick)

HUMBIO 126: Promoting Health over the Life Course: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives
Pertinent to different stages of the life span promoting healthy lifestyle behaviors and reducing risk factors among individuals and communities. Focus is on scientific investigation, application of behavioral science to risk reduction strategies, and role of health promotion as a social and economic imperative. Topics include: chronic disease epidemiology; social determinants of health; obesity, nutrition, and stress; health care delivery and public health systems; workplace wellness; and environmental and international issues.
Prerequisite: Human Biology core or equivalent, or consent of instructor.  3 units, fall quarter (Alles, Stefanick)

HUMBIO 130: Introduction to the Science of Human Nutrition
Course focuses on the study of food, nutrients, and substances therein and includes action, interaction, and balance in relation to health and disease. Emphasis on biological, chemical, and physiological processes by which humans ingest, digest, absorb, transport, utilize, and excrete food.

Dietary composition and individual choices are discussed related to food supply, and to population and cultural, race, ethnic, religious, and social economic diversity. Relationships between nutrition and disease; eating disorders; ethnic diets; vegetarianism; nutritional deficiencies; nutritional supplementation; phytochemicals; and food safety
Prerequisite: Human Biology core or consent of instructor. 3 units, spring quarter (Gardner)

HUMBIO 140: Sex Differences in Human Physiology and Disease
The focus is on the study of the chromosomal and hormonal influences on cells, tissues, and organs that underlie the development of reproductive organs and sexual dimorphism of the neuroendocrine system. Examine the consequences of sex hormones and environmental factors that differ between men and women in systems including the musculoskeletal, neurological, cardiovascular, and immunological. Features guest lecturers.
Prerequisite: Human Biology core or equivalent, or consent of instructor. 3 units, winter quarter (Stefanick)

HUMBIO 165 & Earth Systems 165: Promoting Behavior Change
Apply principles of behavior change to a real world public health problem by creating a series of classroom lessons to promote behavior change related to climate change and environmental sustainability. Students will survey research and methods from a variety of academic perspectives, and they will perform formative research in local elementary schools. Students will not be delivering and evaluating their completed intervention as part of this course, but there may be an opportunity to do so at a later date. 4 units, spring quarter (Robinson)

HUMBIO 166: Food and Society: Exploring Eating Behaviors in Social, Environmental, and Policy Context
The array of forces that affect the foods human beings eat, and when, where, and how we eat them, including economics, business, agriculture, law, politics, trade, ideology, culture, biology, and psychology. The impact of current policies, and actions that might be taken to improve human nutrition and health. Macro-scale influences on food, nutrition, and eating behavior.
Terms: Win | Units: 4 | Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP)
Instructors: Gardner, C. (PI); Robinson, T. (PI)

MED 147/247: Methods in Community Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
The course involves development of pragmatic skills for design, implementation, and analysis of structured interviews, focus groups, survey questionnaires, and field observations. Topics include: principles of community-based participatory research; study designs; validity and reliability; construction of qualitative questions; techniques for moderating focus groups; content analysis of qualitative data; survey questionnaire design; and interpretation of typical statistical analyses.   
3 units, Spring quarter (Kiernan)

PEDS 253: Applied Skill-Building in Clinical and Community-Based Research
This is an elective 2-unit course for the Foundation in Community Health for medical students.  Covers essential skills for writing grant applications for original research, including crafting specific aims, conducting thorough background reviews, describing appropriate research designs and methods, and planning necessary statistical analysis techniques.  2 units winter quarter (Castro)

STATS 211: Meta-research: Appraising Research Findings, Bias, and Meta-analysis (HRP 206, MED 206)
Open to graduate, medical, and undergraduate students. Appraisal of the quality and credibility of research findings; evaluation of sources of bias. Meta-analysis as a quantitative (statistical) method for combining results of independent studies. Examples from medicine, epidemiology, genomics, ecology, social/behavioral sciences, education. Collaborative analyses. Project involving generation of a meta-research project or reworking and evaluation of an existing published meta-analysis. Prerequisite: knowledge of basic statistics. 3 units winter quarter Grading: Medical Satisfactory/No Credit Instructors: (Ioannidis, J. ; Olkin, I.)