A person who practices epidemiology is called what?

• A. Clinician
• B. Epidemiologist
• C. Biostatistician
• D. Public health nurse

Answer: (B)

Epidemiology is the study of how diseases and health events occur, spread, and affect populations, focusing on who is affected, where and when it happens, and why. The person who carries out this work is an epidemiologist. They design and analyze studies to identify risk factors, track outbreaks, and determine how to prevent illness at the population level.

Clinicians diagnose and treat individual patients, so they aren’t primarily practicing epidemiology. Biostatisticians specialize in statistical methods and data analysis, which support epidemiology but aren’t by themselves the practice of studying disease patterns in populations. Public health nurses provide nursing care within public health programs, not the core epidemiologic investigation and analysis.