Course Description
Students in this course learn to characterize human health risk from microbial stressors and develop and evaluate engineering controls for risk management.
Course Objectives
Students will:
- Have an ability to identify, formulate and solve complex engineering problems by applying principles of engineering, science and mathematics.
- Select and compare engineering controls as risk management alternatives using decision analytics tools.
- Describe common, regulated and emerging health hazards, and specific characteristics of each (i.e. disease burden, infection, morbidity and mortality rates, costs of illness, etc.)
- Establish quantitative design criteria based on health risk
- Select an appropriate engineering solution to manage risks
- Have an ability to identify, formulate and solve complex engineering problems by applying principles of engineering, science and mathematics.
- Formulate risk communication strategies for engineers, consumers, business managers, utilities policymakers, etc.
- Utilize risk assessment within the engineering design process to develop objectives and criteria; formulate design problem statements and specification; consider alternative solutions; and address economic factors, such as safety, reliability, ethics and social impact.
- Collaborate as a team to develop a risk assessment that incorporates knowledge across disciplinary boundaries including engineering, microbiology, physiology, statistics, mathematics and physics.
- Apply probabilistic risk models to characterize risks for different exposure scenarios.
- Effectively apply simulation techniques to solve problems with variable or uncertain parameter values.
- Apply basic risk assessment principles to human health-related engineering problems.
- Describe dose-response relationships for various health effects/endpoints associated with hazard exposures in healthy and sensitive populations.
- Identify primary and multiple exposure/transmission routes of environmental hazards.
- Identify exposure pathways and compute hazard quantities along such.
- Develop and utilize mathematical equations to describe propagation of hazards across an exposure pathway.
