The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health today launched a free online course, Infectious Disease Transmission Models for Decision Makers.The three-hour course focuses on infectious disease transmission models—how they work, their types and functions, and how they can be used responsibly to inform public health policy decisions.
The course, available at no charge on Coursera, is intended for professionals and practitioners who make decisions about public health policies, and aims to make them informed consumers of infectious disease models. The course, which applies to all infectious disease transmission, is especially relevant, given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the spread of monkeypox cases around the world.
No expertise in infectious diseases is required and the course does not include any equations. Anyone with a basic background in public health and infectious diseases with an interest in learning more about infectious disease models will benefit from this course. It features modeling examples and case studies such as the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, early transmission projections for COVID-19, and rubella vaccination.
Epidemiologist Emily Gurley, PhD, MPH, professor of the practice at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Amy Wesolowski, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School, teach the course. The development of this training was funded by the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, as part of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Accelerating Modeling Utilization and Synthesis (CAMUS) project. Students who pass the course exam will receive a certificate. To learn more, and to register for the free course, visit the course website.
More than 1.3 million people have enrolled in Dr. Gurley’s COVID-19 Contact Tracing Course on Coursera, which was supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies. These free courses are part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s continuing commitment to develop and make accessible resources for practitioners of public health.
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Media contacts: Carly Kempler at ckemple2@jhu.edu and Jon Eichberger at je@jhu.edu.
