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
The connection between diet and patient health is unequivocal, yet nutrition-based interventions in medical practice remain significantly underutilized. The aim of this course is for you to understand the health and economic consequences of the lack of nutrition education and practice in medicine, and to demonstrate the unique potential for physicians and other health care professionals to serve as change agents for effectively integrating nutrition into medical care.
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.
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
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 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.
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 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.
The seminars consist of student presentation of plans for collection and analysis of data, with discussion by students and faculty. Preparatory work is done under tutorial arrangements with members of the faculty. The emphasis is on conceptual issues necessary for the development of a feasible and informative study.
