TBA

Towering icebergs, adrift in the polar oceans, have long captured our imagination: from the ominous iceberg that sank the Titanic to idioms of a large, hidden part, “the tip of the iceberg”. But are icebergs so mysterious? In this seminar we look at icebergs through the lenses of oceanographers, glaciologists, paleoclimatologists, artists and Arctic people.

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.

This seminar is clickbait vaccine to boost your critical thinking. It is designed to help you identify and refute misinformation, disinformation, and BS rampant on the internet. It will help you recognize sensationalism when science is communicated in the press. It will familiarize you with the main logical fallacies that students and scientists themselves are prone to. As a framework for discussion, we use Bergstrom and West's book "Calling Bullshit” along with supplemental readings.

The purpose of this course is to provide cognitive and heuristic tools to public health practitioners to be well prepared to plan for, respond to, recover from, and mitigate the impact of health disasters precipitated by a variety of threats. The course will provide learners with an awareness of the wide-ranging collaborative processes necessary among public health and medical service providers, as well as cross sectoral dependencies on others such as energy, transportation, public safety, etc.

You are part of the so-called “pivotal generation” for preventing the worst effects of climate change. While global carbon emissions continue to rise yearly, there remains a small window of time for action. What options are available to you for responding to climate change and the unequal burdens it creates?

This studio will explore the complex environmental and social interests of multiple forms of landscape labor—people at work in working landscapes—through the design of regional frameworks and localized sites in coastal Massachusetts.

The studio will explore housing as an ecology of care, a framework that understands architecture not as an isolated product but as a relational practice embedded in networks of interdependence among people, species, systems, and time. In this view, a multi-story residential building is not only a place to live, but a place to heal, connect, and coexist for both human and nonhuman life.

The seminar will consist of three weekend field trips (Friday evening through Sunday afternoon) to Harvard Forest and a final mini symposium (Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon) at the Harvard Forest. The seminar will acquaint students with our current knowledge about global change, drawing upon state-of-the-art research, tools, and measurements used in evaluating and predicting climate change through ongoing studies at the Harvard Forest’s 4,000-acre outdoor classroom and laboratory in Petersham, Massachusetts. Students will spend the weekends at the Harvard Forest (HF) in comfortable accommodations with round-trip travel and meals provided. Through readings, informal discussions, and field excursions, students will become versed in the ecological concepts related to global change, and the science behind current predictions for future climate scenarios. 

We will read leading social science books and articles (from sociology, political science, economics, and psychology) that define the problems, discuss their causes and consequences, and propose solutions.

How can health care systems be restructured to provide high quality care even to the poorest and most vulnerable people on our plant?Health care is never just about medicine. It is about people. It is about those pushed to the margins, whose lives are ground down by poverty, trapped by unjust systems, and devalued by forces that declare some lives worth less than others.

This proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, both spatially and socially – how it becomes legible and desirable, who gets the right to create it and for whom.