Provides students with the opportunity to review the epidemiologic basis for associating selected occupational and environmental exposures with health outcomes and to explore how this science might be used to develop and implement regulation of these exposures.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

Overview of Occupational and Environmental Medicine including: the diagnosis and management of illnesses following exposure to specific workplace substances, environmental and community hazards, such as asbestos, lead, organic solvents, and vibration; methods of diagnosis of early organ system effects of chemicals and techniques for assessing impairment and disability; as well as, medicolegal aspects of occupational health.

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 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.

 interaction between genes and environmental and/or occupational exposures plays a major role in disease development. This course will focus on the underlying science of gene-exposure interactions and will use examples of such interactions and their health consequences. 

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.