 Epidemiology. Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distributions who, when, and where and determinants of health and disease conditions in defined populations. It is the cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidence-based practice by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive health care. Epidemiologists help with study design, collection, and statistical analysis of data, demand interpretation and dissemination of results including peer review and occasional systematic review. Epidemiology has helped develop methodology used in clinical research, public health studies, and, to a lesser extent, basic research in the biological sciences. Major arias of epidemiological study include disease causation, transmission, outbreak investigation, disease surveillance, forensic epidemiology, occupational epidemiology, screening, biominitoring, and comparisons of treatment effects such as in clinical trials. Epidemiologists rely on other scientific disciplines like biology to better understand disease processes, statistics to make efficient use of the data and draw appropriate conclusions, social sciences to better understand proximate and distal causes, and engineering for exposure assessment.