Epidemiologists
Life, Physical, and Social Science
Investigates outbreaks and ongoing disease patterns to find causes, risk factors, and how illness moves from person to person or through animals. Work includes designing studies and questionnaires, overseeing surveillance and other public health programs, and reporting infectious-disease cases to local and state health agencies. Findings are shared with clinicians, policymakers, and the public, and written up for professional journals; teaching others about transmission and prevention is part of the job. Much of the day is spent reading data, thinking through study design, and writing or briefing others rather than treating individual patients. Suits people who like tracing patterns in population health data and explaining those results clearly.
Typical education: Master’s Degree
Annual Median Wage in Field (2025)
$87'220
Median Wage Market Position
$87'220
What you might do
- Investigate what causes disease and how it spreads
- Design studies of disease patterns and prevention
- Run public health tracking and prevention programs
- Report infectious disease cases to health agencies
- Explain findings to doctors, officials, and the public
- Write articles for professional medical journals
Skills that matter
- Disease investigations for cause and spread
- Journal articles on research findings
- Briefings for practitioners and policymakers
- Study design, samples, and questionnaires
- Infectious-disease reports to health agencies
- Oversight of surveillance and prevention programs
AI & the future of this role
Surveillance cleaning, outbreak modeling, and literature synthesis are areas where AI might absorb a large share of analytical work. Study design, messy real-world inference, and advising policy under uncertainty still tend to need human judgment.
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Includes O*NET® 30.3 Database information by USDOL/ETA under CC BY 4.0; modified by LostInCareer. Wage/outlook from BLS. Attribution details