The concentration aims to prepare next-generation public health scholars in complex systems thinking and methods through the following competencies:

• Understand how organizational, community, and health-care systems contribute to public health as complex systems.
• Apply core systems science principles, such as complexity, feedback, emergence dynamics, evolution, endogeneity, social structures, and interactivity to public health research and intervention design.
• Describe how systems thinking and systems science methods contribute to core research activities of description, prediction, explanation and causal inference.
• Design studies incorporating systems science tools, such as agent-based modeling, system dynamics modeling, network analysis, group model building and others.
• Engage diverse partners in systems science research to ensure equitable public health processes and outcomes.

PhD students concentrate in Systems Science for Health Equity by completing related coursework, getting involved in the various research training opportunities at WashU, and conducting mentored dissertation research that contributes to the field.

Students are encouraged to take advantage of training opportunities across the university, such as the quarterly meetings of the Systems Science Interest Group, the annual Systems Sciences for Social Impact Summer Training Institute, and mentored research opportunities through relevant WashU centers such as the Center for Public Health Systems Science, the Center on Social Dynamics and Policy, the Social System Design Lab, the Center for Mental Health Services Research, and the Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy, and Economic Research.