Elective subjects (clinic)
Our institute offers the following electives in the clinical study section:
Global Health
As part of the elective subject “Global Health”, students from the clinical semesters of the two universities of Münster and Witten/Herdecke meet to jointly develop background knowledge about global health. They will then consolidate what they have learned during a visit to various aid organizations in Geneva (CH), such as the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO), Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), through lectures and discussions with local staff. In addition to gaining new knowledge on the topic of global health, students will also gain an insight into the structure and working methods of international organizations. At the same time, career/engagement opportunities are also highlighted both during and after their studies.
The elective follows the flipped classroom principle, in which the attendance phase is deliberately kept short and students work through the course content both in advance and afterwards, partly independently.
You can access the documentation, which consists of the course participants' performance records, here: Final report 2017, Final report 2019, Final report 2023.
If you would like to take part in this elective, please apply in good time by email, stating your matriculation number, semester and a short letter of motivation.
A personal contribution will be charged for travel costs to Geneva.
Scope: 4 SWS as a block course
Next date: September 30 to October 06, 2024
Contact: Veronika Jäger (clinepi@uni-muenster.de)
R for physicians
The aim of this course is to provide each participant with the necessary skills and tools to create a reproducible workflow - from experiment to publication - using the R statistical programming language. The strong practical orientation allows participants to apply what they have learned to their individually relevant projects week by week during the course. This course requires no prior knowledge and is therefore particularly interesting if you are planning to work on your doctoral thesis in the future.
This semester the course is supported by DataCamp - an intuitive learning platform for data science with R. DataCamp's learning method combines short expert videos with hands-on exercises and offers more than 350 courses from experts on topics such as data import, data visualization and machine learning.
Scope: Weekly event (2 SWS)
Next date: Summer semester 2024
Contact: Sven Kleine Bardenhorst (s.kleinebardenhorst@uni-muenster.de)
Critical reading and evaluation of specialist articles
Doctors have to read medical articles on a daily basis - and should also be able to critically assess them. In this elective, we will give you a brief insight into the theoretical background and practise critical reading and assessment of published articles. We use checklists and examples to show you what to look out for.
Scope: 7 appointments of 90 minutes every 14 days (2 SWS)
Next date: Summer semester 2024 (date arrangement & topic allocation end of April 2024)
Contact: Veronika Jäger & Nicole Rübsamen (clinepi@uni-muenster.de)
Introduction to infectious disease epidemiology
Infectious diseases continue to be a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Epidemiology provides important tools for assessing and responding to these health threats in the population.
This course also runs as a “short course” for external students and is recognized as an elective. As a result, there is a “colorful mix” of students' professional backgrounds. The course is taught by lecturers from the University of Münster as well as external lecturers (in winter semester 2022/2023 e.g. from Swiss TPH, BNI, Institut Pasteur, GIZ/RKI). The course will be held in German or English (depending on the preference of the participants and lecturers).
Through lectures and practical “hands-on” exercises, the elective course offers an introduction to infectious disease epidemiology and primarily covers the following content:
- Infectious diseases and their epidemiology, dynamics and transmission
- surveillance
- Outbreak investigations
- Infection prevention and control
- Introduction to the mathematical modeling of infectious diseases
Scope: 3 SWS (block course during the lecture-free period)
Next date: March 4 to 8, 2024
Contact: Veronika Jäger (clinepi@uni-muenster.de)
Flyer with further information
Modern epidemiological and statistical analysis methods
In this elective subject, modern epidemiological and statistical analysis methods are developed on the basis of a book reading. The following readings have been worked on so far:
- Summer semester 2019: An introduction to statistical learning with applications in R (James G, Witten D, Hastie T, Tibshirani R)
- Winter semester 2019/20: Applied longitudinal data analysis for epidemiology: a practical guide (Twisk JWR)
- Winter semester 2020/21: Bayesian statistics for beginners: a step-by-step approach (Donovan T, Mickey RM)
- Summer semester 2021: Causal inference (Hernán MA, Robins JM)
- Winter semester 2021/2022: Handbook of meta-analysis (Schmid CH, Stijnen T, White IR)
- Summer semester 2022: Design of observational studies (Rosenbaum PR)
- Winter semester 2022/2023: Survival analysis for epidemiologic and medical research: a practical guide (Selvin S)
- Winter semester 2023/2024: Applying quantitative bias analysis to epidemiologic data (Lash T, Fox M, Fink A)
Scope: 7 appointments of 90 minutes every 14 days (2 SWS)
Next date: tbd
Contact: Nicole Rübsamen (clinepi@uni-muenster.de)