Katherine M. Keyes, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on life course epidemiology with particular attention to psychiatric disorders, including cross-generational cohort effects on substance use, mental health, and chronic disease. She has particular expertise in the development and application of novel epidemiological methods, and in the development of epidemiological theory to measure and elucidate the drivers of population health.Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, is the Robert A. Knox Professor and Dean at the School of Public Health at Boston University. A physician and epidemiologist interested in the social production of health of urban populations, his work explores innovative cells-to-society approaches to population health questions, with an overall aim of advancing a consequentialist approach to population health scholarship. He is a past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.Together Keyes and Galea have taught introductory epidemiology across various institutions for more than 15 years.

• 1. An introduction to population health science 2. Conceptualizing and evaluating causes for population health science 3. The causes of cases versus causes of incidence 4. Population health across levels, systems, and the lifecourse 5. Ubiquity and the macrosocial determinants of population health 6. Causal architecture to understand what matters most: theory 7. Causal architecture and what matters most: quantitative examples 8. Valuing population health interventions, measuring return on investment 9. Equity and efficiency in population health science 10. Prediction in population health science 11. Case study: Can we reduce obesity by encouraging people to eat better? 12. Case study: Simulating the impact of high-risk and population intervention strategies for the prevention of disease 13. Tensions in population health science

This book's great strength derives from a clear and cohesive narrative dealing with the complex, messy and dynamic way in which the social context of our lives interacts with our individual biological make-up and behaviours - in the here and now, and even preceding conception. [...] The authors seek to embolden the next generation of epidemiologists not to be deterred by political and practical constraints and to embrace ubiquitous factors - those macrosocial variables which might seem out of reach, almost impenetrable.