This course is geared toward graduate students from all schools, but open to passionate undergraduates interested in exploring the implications of global environmental change on nutrition, infectious disease, mental health, and other domains of wellbeing. Throughout the course of the semester, students will engage in diverse materials from many types of examples of planetary health research, from nutrition and mental health, to infectious and non-communicable diseases. 

The course provides an overview of Earth’s energy resources, with emphasize on the factors that control their global distributions and uses in our society. Lectures and labs will emphasize methods used to identify and exploit resources, as well as the environmental impact of these operations.

This course examines the long run and short run prospects for renewable energy.

This course will examine major issues of water resources (i.e. water sources, supply, quality, treatment, use, distribution and storage, policy) in the developing world at various geographic locations and scales.

This course will challenge your assumptions about the world’s populations as you discover surprising similarities and unexpected differences between and within countries.

This class will explore art that attempts to respond to the complexities of global climate change. We are living in a moment where the reality of massive, human-made global climate change has become unavoidable. While fires burn in California and coastlines disappear there have been calls for art that explores and imagines the present and oncoming disaster, with critics such as Amitav Ghosh ask “where is the fiction about climate change?” At the same time, many argue that we already have fiction, art, and poetry about climate change, while others wonder whether art about climate is even important in the face of crisis. Throughout the class we will be asking questions about representation and imagination: How do we describe a climate in flux? The negative effects of climate change are inflicted unevenly. How do people create narratives about environmental loss and the injustice of this loss? Is “Cli-Fi” a genre and if it is what does it look like? What does it mean to imagine the end of humanity or the end of the world, or, as importantly, what does it mean to imagine a future within or after crisis?

In this course we will investigate the ways that Earth and life interact with each other, focusing on the biogeochemical cycles of major elements, and the interplay between complex organisms and their ever-changing environment.

Introduction to the structure, diversity, and physiology of plants with an emphasis on evolutionary relationships and adaptations to life on land.

This is an interdisciplinary graduate-level and advanced undergraduate-level course in which students explore topics in molecular microbiology, microbial diversity, host-microbe associations in health and disease, and microbially-mediated geochemistry in depth.

Emphasis is on the construction of simple engineering models and the application of chemical principles to understand and address current environmental issues.

We live in a world that is shaped by science and technology. As a modern citizen who will lead the U.S. and the world in the coming generation, we should be aware of the rapidly changing landscape of science and technology and be ready to participate in the decision-making processes for deploying these life-changing developments to the masses. In this freshman seminar, we will learn and debate contemporary topics that we encounter every day and use them as motivating examples to explore the underlying science, math, and engineering principles. Some of the issues that we will discuss include, but are not limited to, COVID-19 pandemic, the prosecutor’s fallacy, coronavirus pandemic, climate change, information technology, quantum technology, genomics revolution, and brain-machine interfaces. We will learn basic concepts in statistics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, information science, biomedical engineering, and nano-bio interfaces through these discussions. In this seminar course, the students will be asked to give presentations and participate in discussions and debates.

The course is meant for any student with basic math preparation, not assuming prior science courses. Topics include the greenhouse effect and the consequences of the rise of greenhouse gasses, including sea level rise, ocean acidification, heat waves, droughts, glacier melting, hurricanes, forest fires, and more.