Environment and Health: Exposures from Transportation and Urban Form (2016)

Environment and Health: Exposures from Transportation and Urban Form

Instructors:

Michael Brauer (UBC), Chava Peretz (TAU), and others

Date and Time:

July 17-21, 2016
S, M, Th 08:30-13:00 | T, W 08:30-13:30

Location:

Room TBA, Sackler Faculty of Medicine

Final Exam:

July 22, 2016 | 9:00-11:00 | Room TBA

Pre-requisites:

Statistics & Epidemiology

Course Syllabus

Click here to download the course syllabus.

Course Description

The course will introduce classical, contemporary, and cutting-edge approaches to the estimation of human exposure to environmental exposures related to transportation and urban form for epidemiologic studies as well as risk assessment, regulatory compliance, exposure source/route apportionment, and susceptibility factors.

Qualitative and quantitative methods in exposure science will be covered, including surrogate measures, exposure modeling (themes: geographic information systems and geospatial data, land use regression, dispersion modeling) and biological markers of exposure, in addition to methodological concepts such as exposure measurement error and efficient study design.  Emphasis will be placed on examples from air pollution but other media and environmental stressors related to transportation and urban form will also be included. Thus, in lectures, review of literature, case studies and practical exercises, students will gain familiarity with exposure assessment concepts and methodology and their applications to environmental health. 

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, participants should be able to:

• Describe the general concepts of exposure assessment as applied to environmental health, with emphasis on epidemiology and risk assessment.
• Explain common approaches (direct and indirect measurement, modeling, biomarkers) to assess environmental exposures related to transportation and urban form: noise, air contaminants, greenness, physical inactivity, temperature
• Use geo-statistical approaches to develop a exposure estimates for traffic-related air pollution
• Illustrate how routinely collected environmental measurements and information on human behavior can be used to estimate exposure
• Understand how to use simple measurements to directly assess exposure
• Appreciate the role of exposure misclassification in environmental epidemiology
• Have familiarity with readily available data sources related to transportation and urban form in Israel
• Design an exposure assessment strategy for a selected environmental hazard

Requirements

Participants must pass the final exam with a grade of at least 60 (D) to receive academic credit for the course. Non-credit participants are not required to take the final exam.