The Center for the Assessment of Tobacco Regulations (CAsToR) is offering scholarships for a short course on tobacco simulation modeling (EPID 730: Simulation Modeling of Tobacco Use, Health Effects and Policy Impacts) to be offered online during the University of Michigan Summer Session in Epidemiology (SSE) in July 2026. For those without a modeling background, scholarships are also available for EPID 793: Complex Systems Modeling for Public Health Research (offered two weeks prior to EPID 730), in conjunction with EPID 730 scholarships.
The course will introduce students to the use of simulation modeling to assess the burden of tobacco use on health, and project the impact of tobacco control interventions and regulations on use patterns and downstream health effects. The course will provide an overview of state transition and dynamical system models, their application in public health and policy making, and the use of simulation modeling in tobacco control. Students will learn about the main tobacco simulation models in the literature, become familiar with state transition and dynamical system models, and develop and implement their own smoking simulation models in the R statistical software or Excel. The course will be a combination of lectures by leading experts in the field, modeling lectures, and hands-on lab sessions.
The deadline to apply is April 24, 2026, and applicants are asked to wait to apply to the SSE program until after receiving notification of the scholarship funding decision in May. More information is available here, and the RFA is available here.