Robert H. Friis - Epidemiology for Public Health Practice

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My interest in epidemiology began during the 1960s when, as an undergraduate student at the University of California at Berkeley and a graduate student at Columbia University, I observed the student revolts and activism that occurred during that era. Student unrest was, I believed, a phenomenon that occurred in large groups and could be explained by a theoretical framework, perhaps one that would include such concepts as alienation or anomie. I became interested in studying the distribution of these psychological states in student populations. Unknowingly, I had embarked on epidemiologic research. I find epidemiology to be a field that has great personal appeal because it is capable of impacting the health of large groups of people through improvements in social conditions and environmental modifications. I began formal training in epidemiology at the Institute for Social Research of the University of Michigan, where I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow. My first professional position in epidemiology was as an assistant professor in the Division of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, Columbia University. As a fledging professor, I found epidemiology to be a fascinating discipline and began to develop this textbook from my teaching experiences. I concluded that there was a need for a textbook that would be oriented toward the beginning practitioner in the field, provide coverage of a wide range of topics, and emphasize the social and behavioral foundations of epidemiology and the medical model. The textbook should be welcoming and accessible to masters and beginning students in the field. This textbook evolved from my early teaching experience at Columbia and later teaching and research positions at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Brooklyn College, the University of California at Irvine, and the California State University system. My practical experience in epidemiology, as an epidemiologist in a local health department in Orange County, California, is also reflected in the book.

Robert H. Friis

Like many others now reading this book, I had absolutely no idea what epidemiology was before I took my first required class in it at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. What I discovered was a method to combine my training in nutrition and interest in health with an aptitude for math and analytical reasoning. This led to a change in majors and ultimately a PhD in epidemiology.

My first faculty appointment was at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Before I knew it, I was assigned to teach the introduction to epidemiology course during the winter quarter. This was the time of year when only nonmajors enrolled. I quickly learned, as had my predecessors, that my teaching and learning style was quite different from those of my students. Moreover, most of the textbooks available at that time were geared toward epidemiology majors. For nine years, I studied learning styles (and even codeveloped and cotaught a graduate course on teaching) and experimented to find new ways to present the fundamentals of epidemiology in a nontechnical, nontheoretical, intuitive manner. This text reflects these learning experiences.

Thomas A. Sellers