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. 

This course will examine major issues of solid waste (i.e. production, management, storage, treatment, disposal, infrastructure costs and financing, policy) in the developing world at various geographic locations and scales across municipal, industrial, electronic, biological/medical, and radioactive waste.

This course will explore (i) the legal framework in which climate change action occurs in the United States, (ii) policy tools available to regulators, (iii) impacts on regulated entities and individuals and (iv) opportunities for private stakeholders to participate in and influence climate change decisions.

In this course, we will discuss successful case studies of use of AI for public health, environmental sustainability, public safety and public welfare.

What good is art history in the face of environmental destruction and climate change? How can the close investigation of works of art, produced in times and places far removed from our own, address the vast “failure of collective imagination” that novelist Amitav Ghosh has identified as the core obstacle to our ability to respond ethically and effectively to our non-human co-habitants on earth? This intra-disciplinary seminar intentionally entangles scientific and art historical approaches to real objects in both the art collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the living collections of the Arnold Arboretum. We will focus on how one special class of especially long-lived earthly beings— namely trees—provide living links to distant pasts and futures that no single human can experience, what their persistence can reveal about relationships between other humans and other environments, and what individual case studies can show us about our role as members of a vast embodied network of living beings. During the semester students will have the opportunity to meet with a number of faculty and professionals, including museum curators, conservators, and exhibition designers, as well as the Director of the Arnold Arboretum, its Keeper of Living Collections, and the editor of Arnoldia, the Arboretum’s journal.

The seminar will discuss the nature of the climate challenge and the implications it poses for different communities and different pArts of the world.

This course examines the existing scientific literature on animal-driven contributions to large-scale environmental processes, exploring multiple facets of animal-induced effects, and comparing their magnitude to abiotic and anthropogenic drivers.

This course introduces the fundamentals of circuit theory for the analysis of electrical circuits and the fundamentals of semiconductor devices for the understanding of transistors circuits and other useful actuators and sensors (i.e., transducers).

Concepts developed for understanding today's atmosphere are applied to understanding the record of past climate change and the prospects for climate change in the future.

This course will provide students with an introduction to environmental science and engineering by providing an overview of current environmental issues, including climate change, air pollution, and water pollution.

This course will focus on physical principles underlying semiconductor devices: electrons and holes in semiconductors , energies and bandgaps, transport properties of electrons and holes, p-n junctions, transistors, light emitting diodes, lasers, solar cells and thermoelectric devices.

The aim of this course is to place human beings in a universal and planetary context. You will learn where we come from beginning with the Big Bang and ending with modern human civilization and our relationship to the planet from which we have evolved and on which we depend.