Also called: Syndromic Surveillance Epidemiologist
Watches near-real-time data from emergency rooms to spot outbreaks, overdose spikes or heat illness before anyone reports them.
Opens dashboards showing ER visits across the state. A spike of overdose visits in one county jumps out, so you dig into the records, alert local partners and help send out a warning. You also write code that catches early signs of flu, heat illness or a mysterious rash.
Estimate based on health department epidemiologists.
Approximate: anchored on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a broader job group.
Master's degree, about 6 years after high school. Bachelor's or MPH in epidemiology or data science, with coding in R, SAS or Python.
Ways in: 4-year college, Graduate school. Training cost: $60k – $150k.
Majors to look at: Epidemiology, Public Health, Statistics, Data Science.
Growing faster than average. Public health data systems keep expanding.
Medium risk for 10 years. Anomaly detection gets automated; checking signals and alerting partners stays human.
Classes: AP Statistics, Biology, Computer science.
Career Universe is an early version. Pay, training and AI-risk figures are estimates to start your own research, not verified facts. The research was written with AI research assistants, checked by validation scripts and spot-checked by hand. Check anything important with schools, employers and official sources. How the numbers work.