Academic Mission and Programs

The Mission of the AUA Gerald and Patricia Turpanjian College of Health Sciences (TCHS) is to improve population health and health services in Armenia and beyond through interdisciplinary education, transformative research, and development of health professionals to be leaders in public health, nursing, health services research and evaluation, as well as health care delivery and management.

The TCHS Master of Public Health (MPH) Program engages experienced health professionals and others in transformational education and training in population-based approaches to health and health services research, delivery, and evaluation. Our graduates are then prepared to lead efforts in improving health and health services in Armenia and globally.

The TCHS Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) Program provides the nurses/midwifes who have a diploma in nursing from a vocational level colleges and seek to advance into a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree. The BSN graduates are well-grounded and well-rounded individuals, able to think critically and creatively, learn on their own, understand different kinds of thinking, work in teams, and deal with people from different cultures and disciplines. 

The TCHS Zvart Avedisian Onanian Center for Health Services Research and Development (CHSR) offers practical experience with the research process and program development for TCHS graduates and students while providing service to Armenia and beyond. It provides its expertise as a resource to support and facilitate the existing public health and nursing infrastructure in Armenia. The CHSR fosters collaborative experiences outside the traditional health disciplines to explore solutions to complex health problems. Students have played integral roles in many of the center’s projects, including health status assessments, hospital quality assurance projects, patient and provider experience surveys, development of health education materials, and various training programs.

Our Values include transparency, commitment to the highest level of ethical standards, community engagement and inclusiveness, interdisciplinarity, the highest quality in teaching, research and project implementation, and commitment to sustainable development. Our Goals include:

• Maintain integrity, excellence and a world level academic and professional reputation
• Achieve improved health and healthcare in Armenia and beyond
• Address societal need for interdisciplinary science and practice in public health, nursing, health services, and healthcare in Armenia
• Enhance the scope of academic programs designed to address societal needs and meet international standards for education in health sciences
• Expand the reach of the current academic program and build enrollment in new academic programs.

The AUA TCHS offers a two-year graduate program in Public Health – Master of Public Health (MPH). The MPH program engages experienced professionals from health care and other related fields in transformational education and training in population-based approaches to health and health services research, delivery, and evaluation. Our graduates are then prepared to lead in improving health and health services in Armenia, the Caucasus, Europe, and the World.

The MPH provides a thorough grounding in population-based approaches to health sector problem identification, investigation, analysis, and managed response. The overall objective of the MPH Program is to prepare health professionals to draw on the knowledge and skills from a variety of disciplines to define, critically assess the health needs of people, and translate that knowledge into improved health by designing, implementing, and evaluating programs to meet those needs. Thus, the intensive, modular curriculum emphasizes basic public health sciences and essential managerial and analytic skills including project planning and evaluation, epidemiologic investigation and data analysis, understanding complex determinants of health, effective communication to professional and lay audiences, and leadership.

The two-year curriculum is organized around a guiding framework, which first provides students a conceptual overview of the diverse profession of public health and the team-oriented approach to professional practice (Curriculum Map of the MPH Program).  The courses are taught in intensive, sequential blocks, which build upon and integrate with each other. The first year curriculum provides exposure to the breadth of public health disciplines. The second year curriculum provides advanced training in key methodological disciplines and concludes with a student-directed thesis-like project which integrates essential public health knowledge, skills, and methods in a professionally and personally relevant practice context. Students proceed through the program as part of a defined cohort, fostering group spirit and gaining experience in multi-disciplinary group problem solving, project leadership, and management.

While the program consists almost entirely of requirements, students infuse elective content through the multitude of individual and group projects associated with each module and through special studies activities. Students are encouraged to become involved with the Zvart Avedisian Onanian Center for Health Services Research and Development , which provides an opportunity for supervised, mentored practical experiences while addressing the health needs of Armenia and the region.

The MPH Program is affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health (Baltimore, Maryland, USA) and is a member of the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER). 

For more information please visit https://chs.aua.am/ .