Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology MSc

This course is suitable for applicants from a wide variety of undergraduate degree backgrounds, including biology, healthcare, maths, social sciences, or any related disciplines. We also welcome students onto the course from a wide variety of professional backgrounds, including researchers and non-governmental organisation workers, medical and veterinary doctors, nurses, and development practitioners. Students come from all over the world as well as the UK. This diversity increases opportunities to learn from other students' skills and experiences. Statistical knowledge and skills are not a pre-requisite, but applicants should demonstrate in their applications their willingness to engage with quantitative content and previous experience (from study or work) that will support them in this.

Infection prevention and control are major global health priorities. Researchers, public health personnel, security analysts, international health professionals, policymakers, and those working in health-related finance all need to understand infectious disease epidemiology at some level, including the impact of infectious diseases and barriers to infection control.

Tomorrow’s infectious disease epidemiologists will need a firm grounding in core principles such as transmission dynamics and study design and analysis. However, radical developments and scientific advances, including pathogen genomics and other molecular technologies, big data opportunities, and the microbiota, have changed the way we can measure host-pathogen relationships. We also recognise increasingly the role of sociodemographic determinants in infectious diseases.

This MSc takes an interdisciplinary approach to infectious disease epidemiology, layering basic and clinical science, bioinformatics, and molecular epidemiology on top of essential statistical, epidemiological, and critical appraisal skills. This course will enable you to assess the quality of quantitative evidence in infectious diseases, public health policy and beyond, as well as to construct a research question, work with quantitative data, choose and apply methods, and interpret findings.

Examples of publications arising from infectious disease-related dissertations completed by MSc students at UCL Institute for Global Health include:

• Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 among hospitalized patients in Estonia: Nationwide matched cohort study. Tisler et al, PLoS ONE 2022 Nov 23
• Barriers and Facilitators Associated With Vaccine Acceptance and Uptake Among Pregnant Women in High Income Countries: A Mini-Review. Qiu, X. et al. Frontiers in Immunology, 2021
• Psychosocial support interventions to improve treatment outcomes for people living with tuberculosis: a mixed methods systematic review and meta-analysis. Maynard, C. et al. EClinicalMedicine. 2023
• Estimating the number of livebirths to Hepatitis C seropositive women in England in 2013 and 2018 using Bayesian modelling. Dema et al, PLoS ONE 2022