[MUSIC] Hi, I'm Karen Yeatts. >> And I'm Lorraine Alexander and we'd like to welcome you to the course Epidemiology the Basic Science of Public Health. Before we begin, about the course I'd like to tell you a little bit about myself. I'm a clinical associate professor in the department of epidemiology at UNC Chapel Hill. My specialty area is distance learning and I've been involved in distance learning since 1998 and taught the first online course in the school of public health. Currently, I am working at the North Carolina Institute of Public Health. Doing continuing education and, online continuing education, and I'm the director of the Field Epidemiology Online Certificate Program. >> And Lorraine and I have actually have been working together for over 20 years. Teaching epidemiology both online and in the classroom, so we really excited to have this opportunity to do a, a MOOC on epidemiology. People who end up studying or doing research in epidemiology have somewhat of a circuitous route, and so my route was I had a bachelor's, I got a bachelor's degree in chemistry. And then I was interested in human health and environmental exposures, and so I got a environmental science engineering degree doing toxicology. But then I realized I wanted to study human populations, and so then I discovered epidemiology. And got a Master's, and then a, a PhD here at UNC. And so I started working with Lorraine in 1994. And so we hope to bring some of the excitement of the discovery of epidemiology. And this course is for all levels of learners. You never have to have heard about epidemiology before. And you can also be working in a public health field, so we, we've tried to make it as broad and general as possible. >> So with that said, we'd like to give you a little bit of overview what you're going to be learning in the next five weeks. I'm going to start the course off by talking about what epidemiology is, epidemiology's place in public health. And some of the pioneers in epidemiology, as well as the population perspective of epidemiology. >> Once we cover that background then we'll dive in in week two to measures of disease frequency. Then week three we'll talk about four different commonly used study designs. Week four we'll we'll review measures of association that are used with the various study designs. >> And I'm going to wrap the course up by talking about causality and causal inference in week five. We hope that you will enjoy the course and all the resources that we've put together for you to take with you in your epidemiology toolkit once you leave the course. >> Yeah. So, anyway, welcome, and let's begin.