Climate change is an urgent and multifaceted challenge facing all of society.
Harvard faculty teach an expanding array of courses examining the many dimensions of this shared challenge. Explore courses in climate and sustainability ranging from economics and English to public health and climate science.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
THE SALATA INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY
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.
This course examines application of epidemiologic methods to environmental and occupational health problems. Objectives are to review methods used in evaluating the health effects of physical and chemical agents in the environment, to review available evidence on the health effects of such exposures, and to consider policy questions raised by the scientific evidence.
A central aim of this seminar is to reveal the plurality of ways landscapes are shaped across the African continent and how they help mitigate the impacts of changing climates and social injustice now and in the future.
The course will be designed to provide students with an understanding of relevant physical, technical and social factors including an historical perspective.
This class will cover basic principles of high performance building design, construction and operation, and impacts on indoor environmental quality, including chemical exposures, light, noise and thermal comfort. One class each week will be dedicated to lectures on these topics, with case studies and experiences from building practitioners that have successfully incorporated sustainability features in historic and contemporary structures.
This course covers applied advanced regression analysis. Its focus is on relaxing classical assumptions in regression analysis to better match what epidemiological data really looks like. Specifically, the course will cover nonlinear exposure-response relationships and repeated measure designs, including non-parametric and semi-parametric smoothing techniques, generalized additive models, quantile regression, and time series models.
Emphasis is on the construction of simple engineering models and the application of chemical principles to understand and address current environmental issues.
Topics in linear algebra that frequently arise in applications, especially in the analysis of large data sets: linear equations, eigenvalue problems, linear differential equations, principal component analysis, singular value decomposition; data mining and machine learning methods: clustering (unsupervised learning) and classification (supervised) using neural networks and random forests
The course emphasizes a molecular scale understanding of energy and entropy; free energy in equilibria, acid/base reactivity, and electrochemistry; molecular bonding and kinetics; catalysis in organic and inorganic systems; the union of quantum mechanics, nanostructures, and photovoltaics; and the analysis of nuclear energy.
This course offers a comprehensive overview of gaseous and particulate air pollutants. It will emphasize pollutant sources, physical and chemical properties, sampling and analysis, chemical transformation, atmospheric transport, fate, and potential for adverse health and environmental impacts.
Studies contemporary Russian poetic practice with an emphasis on very recent work. Interrogates poetry’s capacity to respond to ongoing crises, including the cultural freedoms and economic chaos of the 1990s, the COVID pandemic, climate catastrophe, and the Russo-Ukraine war. Recurring themes are border crossings (in language, temporalities, genre, and geography); innovations in form and self-representation; poetry performance and visual display; and the changing representations of emotion and mind.