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Real World Application of Public Health Skills and Training

When you enroll at the Yale School of Public Health, you'll hear a lot about the internship and applied practice experience practicum requirements. These immersive experiences are carefully planned, supported and evaluated by our practice and career management staff. Both experiences provide robust opportunities for the real-world application of public health knowledge and skills and support your career goals. Many students report inspiring, life changing experiences from their time around the world and in local settings. Your internship may fulfill the applied practice experience requirement, but if not, there are multiple practicum courses from which you can choose that will provide the hands-on public health practice training required for your MPH degree.

Applied Practice Experience and the Internship

Sample practicum projects

  • In partnership with ATA, examining relationships between broadband access and other datasets that serve as proxies for socioeconomic status. Datasets and heat maps were used to create targeted interventions and inform policy.
  • Assist in analyzing results from a community survey conducted with residents in New Haven specifically to assess experience with, access to, and hesitancy with obtaining COVID-19 testing. Findings were utilized by the New Haven Health Department to inform policies and programming.
  • Develop and implement a key informant survey to determine the success of Yale New Haven Hospital’s 2019 health improvement plan and provide direction for 2022 efforts.

Recent internships

  • Research and Analysis Internship Project, Accenture, China
  • Big Data Analysis on Aden Tech - Yale's Project of Hospital Impatient Profile Data in China, Aden Tech, China
  • Diabetes in Patients with HIV, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, USA
  • Development of Cardiomyopathy Database with EHR and Population Data, Brigham and Women's Hospital, USA
  • Analyzing Experimental Data to Evaluate Children's Cognitive Function, C8 Sciences, USA
  • Analyst, China Universal Asset Management, China
  • Analyzing Health of Skilled Nursing Facilities as a Function of Product Spend, Direct Supply, Inc., USA
  • Fosun International Biomedical Investment Summer Internship, Fosun International, China
  • Bio-Data Analyst, Genewiz, China
  • Bioinformatic Internship, Hengrui Medicine, China
  • Exploring the Potential Opportunities Brought by Prescription Outflow, IQVIA, China
  • The Impact of Air Pollution on Women's Pregnancy Outcome, Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital, China
  • Co-Pay Design Optimization for Merck and Its Health Products, Merck, USA
  • Healthcare Related Projects Management and Data Analysis for Merck Research Laboratories (MRL), Merk Sharp & Dohme Corp, USA
  • Market Access to Hemophilia B Gene Therapy, UniQure, USA
  • Identify and Classify Environmental Indicators, United Nations, USA
  • Medical Image Analysis, VoxelCloud, USA
  • Identification of Environmental Risk Factors on Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology (CPPEE), USA
  • The Impact of Carbapenem Sparing Interventions on the Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance, Yale University, USA
Rev. 8.4.2021

Research Opportunities

Opportunities for research abound at Yale. Although a master’s thesis is optional for MPH students in biostatistics, many students use their summer internship to do research that culminates in a thesis. Others work with faculty labs and research teams to access data and formulate their analysis. In addition, many students work as research assistants at the Yale School of Public Health, Yale School of Medicine, Yale New Haven Hospital or the VA. Many of these projects culminate in peer review publications.

Recent Thesis Topics

  • A Review and Evaluation on the Study Designs and Statistical Methods for Dealing with Immortal Time Bias
  • Investigating MDD Symptom Clusters and Personalized Treatment Selection within the VAST-D Randomized Clinical Trial
  • Comparison of SNP Calling Tools for RNA Sequencing Data
  • The Use of Propensity Score Methods on Observational Studies: A simulation and case study on patients with cirrhosis
  • Special Trends in Lung Cancer Mortality in the United States, 1969-2004
  • Pattern Mixture Model and Joint Modelling Approach to Assess Treatment Effects in A Major Depressive Disorder Clinical Trial with Non-ignorable Missing Data
  • Human Disease Network: A Study Based on Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database
  • Bayesian Integrative Analysis of Heterogeneous Data in Breast Cancer Prognosis
  • Analysis of Survival Data using Model Averaged 2-D Clustering by Maximum Likelihood
  • Analysis of Transcriptomic Data in Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency Study