Overview
Epidemiology is the field that concerns the spread of health determinants and distributions across populations, generally with the goal of influencing public health policy. This extends beyond infectious diseases and environmental contamination to trends in obesity and stress. Studies show that weight gain actually spreads across populations, implying that even something as fundamental as diet has psychosocial dimensions independent of individual factors or socioeconomic circumstances.
Commentary
Personally, I love epidemiology as a field. I don’t have much exposure to it aside from my undergraduate education and some MIT hackathons around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but, for me, it combines the social impacts of public health policy with the theoretical models of network science and graph theory.