Quantitative Analysis of the Impact of Pollutants On Human Health: Computational and Experimental Methods

The aim of the course is to provide students with the basics on how to analyse human health data in a quantitative way and with a statistical approach that allows most of the significant information to be extracted. The complex relationship between the environment and the health status of the human population makes it increasingly important that appropriate professionals have the right tools at their disposal to analyse big data (BigData) and particularly noisy biological data.
Above all, acquiring a rigorous and scientific method is very important to understand and give meaning to the relationship between environment and risk of related diseases. Students will be provided with quantitative computational tools and biological and biomedical data interpretation tools. The overall training objective of the course is to lay the foundations to understand the main risks on human health in their complexity and to provide quantitative tools for monitoring. In silico and laboratory tools will also be provided to design possible risk prevention strategies.

At the end of teaching, the student should be able to critically address a pollution problem related to human health by deciding on the best strategy for understanding the relationship. They will also need to demonstrate that they can read the scientific literature in an appropriate and critical way, including statistical analysis, biological models used and how biological data is collected or analysed. Finally, the students will also have to take into account the spread of the disease and the possible risk to the population.