Course Timeline

A graduate certificate in Veterinary Preventive Medicine requires a minimum of 15 credits distributed across a minimum of 10 credits of core courses and 5 credits of elective courses. All courses are taught online in the indicated semester.

The Graduate Certificate is designed for students to start classes in the Spring Semester (January) or the Fall Semester (August).

Required core courses (7 credits)

VDPAM 522. Principles of Epidemiology and Population Health. 3 cr.
Epidemiology and ecology of disease in populations. Disease causality and epidemiologic investigations. Issues in disease prevention, control, and eradication. Recommended Spring Year 2

STAT 401. Statistical Methods for Research Workers. 4 cr.
Methods of analyzing and interpreting experimental and survey data. Statistical concepts and models; estimation; hypothesis tests with continuous and discrete data; simple and multiple linear regression and correlation; introduction to analysis of variance and blocking. Recommended Fall Year 1 or Spring Year 1

The remaining 3 core credits can be selected from any VDPAM course listed below

VDPAM 521X. Risks, Benefits, Science & Policy of Food. 3 cr.
Introduction of risk analysis principles applied to food safety issues. Offered Spring.

VDPAM 527. Applied Statistical Methods in Population Studies. 3 cr.
Measures of agreement, assessment of diagnostic tests, logistic regression, correlated data analysis, survival analysis, bioinformatics, linear models, comparison of multiple groups. Offered Fall odd numbered years

VDPAM 529. Epidemiological Methods in Population Research. 3 cr.
Designing, conducting, and analyzing data from field-based studies, including cross-sectional, case-control, cohort, and ecological studies. Clinical trials. Modeling disease in populations. Offered Fall even numbered years

VDPAM 570. Risk Assessment for Food, Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine. 3 cr.
Risk assessment principles as applied to biological systems. Exposure and effects characterization in human and animal health and ecological risk assessment. Risk analysis frameworks and regulatory decision-making. Introduction to quantitative methods for risk assessment using epidemiological and distributional analyses. Uncertainty analysis. Offered Fall odd numbered years

The remaining 5 or more elective credits can be any approved Iowa State University graduate level course including, but not limited to, any remaining core courses. With the permission of the Director of Certificate Education, students may also take graduate level courses at another approved institution to fulfill the requirements of the certificate.

Refer to the Iowa State University online course catalog at: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~catalog/ for other course opportunities.