About

The CDC Museum's Public Health Academy Online Summer Course is a free, web-based program combining synchronous and asynchronous instruction, open to students who will be high school juniors or seniors the following school year and who are at least 16 years old on the first day of the course. For 2026, it ran June 8–12, with required live sessions each day from 1:00–3:30 p.m. ET and a total daily time commitment of 4–6 hours; applications for the 2026 cohort have closed, with the application window for the following year's course typically opening the preceding January.

Content spans a wide range of public health topics — epidemiology, global health, infectious and chronic disease, injury and violence prevention, environmental health, emergency preparedness and outbreak response, disease surveillance, scientific communication, and public health law — delivered through a mix of self-paced asynchronous lessons (readings, videos, knowledge self-checks) and live synchronous sessions where a museum educator and a CDC subject-matter expert lead discussion with the group. Daily assignments include short quizzes, readings, and case studies. The course is explicitly framed around the collection, analysis, and application of public health data rather than clinical medicine — students interested in becoming physicians will encounter little to no treatment-focused content.

This is the lower-intensity, higher-capacity sibling of CDC Museum's in-person Disease Detective Camp: the online course offers roughly 75 spots for 2026 versus 27 per session for the in-person camp (which draws 650–750 applicants for those 54 total seats), making the online course meaningfully more accessible while still selective and application-based. Both programs are free and staffed by CDC Museum educators and CDC subject-matter experts. The course is genuinely global in reach — the 2025 cohort included students from 27 states, a U.S. territory, and six foreign countries — and eligibility is explicitly open to international applicants, who need only ensure they can attend the live 1:00–3:30 p.m. ET sessions regardless of their own time zone.

This suits a student curious about public health as a field — particularly the data, policy, and systems side rather than clinical medicine — who wants a free, low-barrier way to test that interest without travel or cost, and who can commit to the fixed live-session schedule for a full week. It's a lighter, shorter, and more accessible alternative to a residential public-health-focused program for a student who isn't yet ready for or able to manage travel to an in-person option.