EEPE Course

A nice PhD course covering a wide range of digital tools that they use.

Author

Stéphane Tuffier

Published

July 22, 2025

This July, I had the privilege of attending the 37th European Educational Programme in Epidemiology (EEPE course). The course is located near Florence, on Fiesole hills. I attended the last two of the four week of the course. More than 150 students coming from all over Europe and beyond attended the lectures on various topics ranging from data science in epidemiology to humanitarian epidemiology.

It’s quite far from Denmark, but I was committed to traveling there by train. This was a pleasant two day journey with a spectacular crossing of the Alps through the Brenner Pass.

Beside connecting and networking with many fellow PhD students, Postdocs and researchers, I also learn many interesting things. Here are some hightlights of these learnings:

The importance of triangulation in epidemiology: diverse designs and methods can help the scientific community address causal questions and investigate the relevance of exposure effects on our health. Among the many methods that we went through during the course we havev learned that sibling studies help reduce the impact of family confounders such as parental education and income. Mendelian randomization sutdies uses genetics as instrumental variables to estimate the causality of a specific exposures on health outcomes. Finally, negative controls can be very powerful in disentangling confounding by estimating association between unrelated events to an exposure to reveal confounding issues.
Rediscovering missing data and the differences between various types of missing data (MCAR, MAR, and MNAR). Although these concepts may seem straightforward, they are complex and a bit difficult to fully grasp. Using some very simple example, I relearned the differences and specificity of each of this type of missing data.
In the GIS cours, I learn how to handle geographic data to measure exposure and relate them to health outcomes. This is essential in environmental epidemiology. This led me to create this map, depicting the countries of residence and research of the students. The bright colors indicate a higher number of students per country.

Where are the EEPE students comming from? The bright colors indicate a higher number of students per country

For those who want to read more, here are some papers of interest:

Lawlor, Debbie A, Kate Tilling, and George Davey Smith. 2016. “Triangulation in Aetiological Epidemiology.” International Journal of Epidemiology 45 (6): 1866–86. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyw314.

Pedersen, Alma B., Ellen M. Mikkelsen, Deirdre Cronin-Fenton, Nickolaj R. Kristensen, Tra My Pham, Lars Pedersen, and Irene Petersen. 2017. “Missing Data and Multiple Imputation in Clinical Epidemiological Research.” Clinical Epidemiology 9 (March): 157–66. https://doi.org/10.2147/CLEP.S129785.