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What does a typical day in the life of an epidemiologist look like?

I’m a high school junior considering a career as an epidemiologist. I’ve looked on many websites trying to see how one might spend their typical workday but have gotten mixed responses (spending the day doing math/statistics, field work, lab tests, etc.) . I’m curious to know my potential work environment and/or schedule. Thanks! #epidemiology #science #publichealth

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Kathleen’s Answer

I am trained as a pharmacoepidemiologist, one of the many flavors of specialization within the field. This involves the area of medical inverventions (drugs, diagnostics, genetic treatments, blood products, devices, tissue regeneration, etc). One works with teams of individuals who have expertise in the disease area, bioanalytical and statistics, study design and protocol writing, team leader, results analysis and study write up. Questions of interest in this specialty include: disease incidence and prevalence, establishing unmet needs to determine if a new drug or intervention might benefit, safety monitoring after populations are exposed to the intervention, identification of subpopulations that are not or are responding to a treatment.
An example of a pharmacoepidemiologic question is " does the use of tetracycline (antibiotic for an infection) lead to Achilles tendon rupture". The best way to answer this question includes using large healthcare databases (electronic health records from many hospital systems), health insurance claims, and prior randomized clinical trials and their safety databases.
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David’s Answer

Most Epidemiologists spend their day doing supervise professional, technical, and clerical personnel. A typical day for an Epidemiologist will includes; Overseeing the public health programs which included statistical analysis, health care planning, surveillance systems, and public health improvement. They are seeking to reduce the risk and occurrence of negative health outcomes through research, community education and health policy.

- Plan and direct studies of public health problems to find ways to prevent and to treat the problems.
- Collect and analyze data—including using observations, interviews, surveys, and samples of blood or other bodily fluids—to find the causes of diseases or other health problems.
- Communicate their findings to health practitioners, policymakers, and the public.
- Manage public health programs by planning programs, monitoring progress, analyzing data, and seeking ways to improve them, among other activities.
- Supervise professional, technical, and clerical personnel.

Like you said you will be spending time in labs doing tests, in outdoors doing field work, in the office writing reports and programs. In the field of being an Epidemiologists or doing epidemiology work you are either doing all 3 categories of work or you will be just doing 1 or 2 from the three. Lab tests, Outside Field collecting data, and/or in office writing report and program. That is what your typical practice and work of an Epidemiologists do.
Thank you comment icon Thanks for taking the time out of your day to provide a helpful answer my question! Very much appreciated. Grace
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Ashley’s Answer

Epidemiology is an excellent field to go into and I highly recommend it. I often wish I focused on epidemiology (Epi) during my master's degree as the study of disease is truly fascinating. The one thing I like to tell people about public health is that it is truly everywhere and job roles and responsibilities can vary. Since you are in High School, you have plenty of time to iron out what area you would want to work in but make sure you volunteer and job shadow as much as you can! I worked at my county health department in Florida for 3 years. The state of Florida runs their health departments from the state level, rather than on a local level. I, myself am not epidemiologist, but I have many friends who worked in the Epi department. They have worked through Ebola, Zika. Hepatitis A and now COVID-19. Majority of their job tasks include preparing reports, contact tracing and investigating potential and confirmed cases. Occasionally, they might be out in the field assisting with frontline response- contact tracing or investigating clusters in cases at a retirement community or helping run testing sites. Working for a health department would provide a regular working schedule, M-F, 9-5. During a time like COVID-19 or other public health emergency, you can expect to work additional hours.
Thank you comment icon Thanks for taking the time to answer! Grace
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