A new University of Cincinnati course aims to inform the community on the science behind COVID-19.
Students may enroll in the course, “MEDS3010: Science of the COVID-19 pandemic,” for official credit, or the course can be accessed online after the class is complete by community members without cost (without course credit or class discussion). The first lecture will be uploaded on Feb. 1.
The course was developed by multiple current Medical Science students and alumni of the program with support from William Miller, Ph.D. and Anil Menon, Ph.D. of the UC College of Medicine.
Scottie Emmert, a second-year medical student at UC’s College of Medicine, is one of the people who helped develop the course.
“The unknown was honestly one of the most frightening parts of their whole pandemic,” Emmert tells CityBeat. “So we came up with the class to try and provide more information and understanding [about COVID-19].”
Emmert plans for students to take the information gleaned from the class and use it to inform their community, friends and family. Then, Emmert hopes, there will be a ripple effect of knowledge instead of a spread of misinformation.
Course lectures will be available online without charge for the community to use for these same reasons. “I’d say we really just wanted to kind of share the wealth of knowledge that we were trying to accumulate in this course with the public so that they would, again, have a central kind of area of information that they could trust us in,” Emmert says.
The University of Cincinnati is supporting COVID-19 research in other ways, as well. Miller, a professor of molecular genetics at UC College of Medicine and one of the supporters of the class, nods to UC’s pilot grants that were first offered for COVID-19 research in March, right after the initial lockdown was put in place. The UC Office of Research and the College of Medicine’s Office of Research committed at least $225,000 to fund pilot projects that focus on all research aspects of COVID-19, according to a document released by the University of Cincinnati. In April, the university announced that 11 pilot grants, totalling $425,000, were awarded to researchers across campus.
Miller said the efficacy of the vaccine is the most pressing topic surrounding COVID-19. “How efficacious is the vaccine going to be in the real world, in the 330 million population of America?” Miller poses. “How quickly are people going to become comfortable with getting the vaccine? I think that as we get into the summer, we’re gonna see big changes.”
Emmert and Miller have arranged for experts on topics ranging from epidemiology to molecular biology and ethics to pulmonary clinicians who are studying the patients to speak during the course. Some guest lecturers will be Margaret Powers-Flechter, Ph.D., and Pooja Khatri, MD, MSc. Both doctors are professors at UC’s College of Medicine.
CityBeat has updated this story to reflect that in order to receive official credit, you must enroll in the course.
This article appears in Jan 1-31, 2021.