Discover who you are and how to maximize your strengths and promote your best self with confidence in professional settings.

As nation's largest health care system, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) provides medical and other services to over 8 million individuals that served our country. Honoring its obligation to these deserving Veterans, the system dedicates itself to a vulnerable population with numerous physical and mental health ramifications of military service, yet consistently outperforms other health systems in terms of quality metrics and patient satisfaction.

While the health and wellbeing of the nation has improved overall, racial, ethnic, gender and sexuality disparities in morbidity and mortality persist. To successfully address growing disparities, it is important to understand social determinants of health and translate current knowledge into specific strategies to undo health inequalities. This course will explore social justice as a philosophical underpinning of public health and will consider the etiology of disease rooted in social conditions.

This course will explore today's opioid epidemic through the lenses of biology, history, the arts, and literature. We will critically examine and seek to understand the epidemic through the lenses of public health, human biology, medicine, sociology, political science, and public policy.

This course presents an overview of the field of public health, including major health problems; social, behavioral, and environmental factors affecting health; important actors within the public health system; and approaches used.

This course intended to provide students with practical knowledge to understand obesity epidemics in the U.S., and an overview of federal, state, and local policy approaches and national initiatives for preventing obesity, promoting healthy behaviors, and providing care to obese citizens. There will also be extensive discussion of evidence for the impact of policies on child and adolescent overweight, including ethnic/racial and socioeconomic disparities. Students will be provided with an opportunity to develop an intervention targeting any perspective of obesity.

The public health community - individuals and organizations - have an important role to play in shaping how populations receive and gain access to accurate health information. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention defines health communication as "the and use of communication strategies to inform and influence individual and community decisions that enhance health." This class will provide an introduction to the issues and methods associated with effective communication of health related information.