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Risk Sciences

- Should one eat more or less fish? Is fish beneficial… or dangereous because of mercury and PCB's?
- What are the risks and impacts on human health related to consumption and international trade?
- Flame retardants are saving lives! Ho far do they also damage human health?
- How to communicate risks in a balanced and sound way?

To address such questions, the MPH graduate specializing in RISK science at the University of Michigan has unique opportunities:

- to receive a training that is highly relevant to practical and essential societal decisions|

- - to benefit of the outstanding interdisciplinary expertise of the EHS faculties and of the University of Michigan Risk Science Center in all facets of risk

- to discover the latest methods, measurements techniques and modeling skills used in risk science and involve himself in research.

The MPH graduate specializing in RISK science at the University of Michigan will assess environmental and occupational risks using the best available risk assessment tools; communicate the results of risk assessments to the appropriate target audience(s) and identify alternative actions that can help reduce or prevent environmental and occupational risks, thereby improving human health.

Training objective

1. Provide an interdisciplinary education that encompasses information on general public health (biostatistics environmental health, epidemiology, health behavior, health management), as well as more targeted topics such as environmental chemistry, risk assessment and characterization, risk management and risk communication.
   
   
2. Develop skills and competencies in risk assessment, priority setting and decision making to manage risks, prediction of changing risks, foresighting to prevent/mitigate future risks, and communication of risk to scientific and lay communities.
   
   
3. Provide the knowledge and develop the skills and competencies that will enable the graduate specializing in risk science to be employed in industry (health and safety specialists, insurance and service company risk assessors, contaminated site managers), governmental agencies, consulting positions or research positions in a wide variety of sites.

Skills

When students complete the risk science specialization, they should have competence in the following areas:

General environmental and public health

• Apply methods of biostatistics and epidemiology to evaluation of risks affecting the health of the public.
• Recognize adverse health consequences of well-known environmental exposures.
• Identify mechanisms of intoxication and other exposure effects.

Risk science

• Apply the principles of environmental chemistry to the identification of environmental risks.
• Apply the most up-to-date fate and exposure models to identify, characterize, and quantify exposure pathways, both indoors and outdoors.
• Assess dose-response relationships. Identify properties of chemicals that render them potentially hazardous to health and properties of biological systems that modify susceptibility to toxicants.
• Determine and interpret the toxicokinetics of substances and the resulting biological effects in humans.

Risk assessment

• Characterize risk for a wide range of applications, applying both current and emerging probabilistic/comparative methods. .
• For both human health and ecosystems, identify and manage the main risks and impacts associated with the life cycle of current and new products and/or technologies.
• Analyze risks and benefits related to both present regulations and practices, and new regulations or technologies

Risk management and communication

• Analyze decision making and management of risk in a variety of settings, including industrial and governmental contexts.
• Analyze the legal context for decision making and management of risk in different settings.
• Develop scenario analyses and foresighting that can be applied to future risk prevention and/or mitigation.
• Evaluate the role of both evidence based science and public perception in providing effective risk communication.