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Dale Sandler, Ph.D., weighs in on epidemiology as a career in the latest U.S. News and World Report annual “Best Jobs” report.
By Jennifer Harker
The annual U.S. News and World Report Best Jobs report is out and this year’s No.1 science job is epidemiology. Epidemiology is a medical science that investigates all the factors that determine the presence or absence of diseases and disorders in populations. The report featured NIEHS Epidemiology Branch Chief and Senior Investigator Dale Sandler, Ph.D. She weighed in on what it is like to work as an epidemiologist.
“The thing about epidemiology is it’s a career that can go in many different directions,” Sandler told U.S. News. She explained that epidemiologists work in hospitals and practice infection control, and they work for governmental agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to track outbreaks of infectious or noninfectious illnesses, develop vaccines, and help eradicate diseases. She also explained that they study non-infectious disease and mentioned her work in large population cohorts.
The NIEHS Epidemiology Branch is made up of eight epidemiology research groups led by intramural scientists.
Sandler leads the Chronic Disease Epidemiology Group.
Among their work, NIEHS intramural scientists lead numerous long-term prospective epidemiological studies.
Visit the Studies page for a full list of NIEHS epidemiological studies.
NIEHS offers various resources for epidemiologists, too.
“The NIEHS Epidemiology Branch is the ‘crown jewel’ of our intramural research program,” said NIEHS Scientific Director Darryl Zeldin, M.D. “NIEHS epidemiologists enhance the public health relevance of our work by helping us translate our basic and clinical research findings to human populations in addition to the primary data that they generate from their large prospective cohort studies and novel hypotheses. Their ability to go from lab bench to population and back again is a major strength of our intramural program.”
U.S. News ranks jobs by calculating seven component measures: 10-year growth volume, 10-year growth percentage, median salary, employment rate, future job prospects, stress level, and work-life balance. See 2023 Best Jobs report for the full article.
(Jennifer Harker is a technical writer-editor in the NIEHS Office of Communications and Public Liaison.)
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