Rural Public Health

Catalog description

This course will be anchored by a class research project, where together, we will work through a public health topic in real-time. The overarching goal of this class is to provide students with a solid basis for understanding public health issues in rural settings, and how to carryout, thoughtful, and impactful public health studies and environmental exposure assessments in rural communities. For the Spring 2024 semester, students enrolled at Brown University and Tougaloo College will develop a public health research project based in Gloster, Mississippi, a rural community of only 897 residents, grappling with pollution coming from one of the largest wood pellet manufacturing companies in the world. We will leverage a current and ongoing air pollution monitoring network and public health study to examine the relationship between air quality and community health.