The long-term goal of this site is to help two large groups of people at APHC: 1) Public Health Professionals who desire the ability to learn how to augment data in a quick and effecient manner in a short amount of time; and 2) Free-range learners, or professionals who aren’t taking a formal class and are interested in learning online on their own time. We aim to start with students in a distance learning type environment then attempt to build on the material generated to make it maximally useful to the broader audience of public health professionals who want to learn how to use programming and database management systems. We are interested in helping folks who are complete beginners and those who already have some programming background.

To encourage folks to use this material all of the general material on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License and all programs are licensed under the MIT License.

Be sure to let us know what you think so we can be sure to get you the best experience.

Examples of folks who we are trying to help:

Allen: An budding public health intern, part of the ORISE or other volunteer program either realizes that computers are going to be important in public health and epidemiology he ends up working or likes computers and thinks learning about them be more fun than the other available electives. He has never programmed before and doesn’t really know what a database is.

Jenny: A mid-tier employee at APHC with a background in doing hands on biology/epidemiology either in the lab or the field. A recipent of a graduate degree she’s realized that managing the data she’s collecting in a reasonable way is going to be important (working with the hodge podge of poorly structured spreadsheets that her lab uses is awful), and doing all of the analysis that she needs to conduct for her assigned projects seems like it would be a lot easier if it could be automated.

Paul: A senior level public health profession with little computer background who realizes that computing and data management has become so central to his area of research that he needs to at least have a rough idea of how his team memebers are working the magic they do for projects with a lot of programming. Even better he’d like to get to the point where he can really engage and help out.