This course is intended as a survey of the ideas, theories, data, methods and debates in the study of global health and population. It is organized around two major themes. The first theme – family and population health – will cover the major present and future drivers of population health globally (such as aging, urbanization, changing lifestyles, pandemics, and climate change), as well as the major burdens of diseases and their global distributions. It will further cover the important relationships between global health, human development and equitable societies. The second theme – health systems – will cover underlying theories and empirical evidence for analyzing different components of a health care system and how they interact with each other to determine a health system’s performance.

This course will challenge your assumptions about the world’s populations as you discover surprising similarities and unexpected differences between and within countries.

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.

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.

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.

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 the relationship between Climate Change Preparedness, UN SDGs, community problems, and current sustainable and social solutions to serve as a starting point for developing new solutions that might serve as the business or social cases to conceive and fund startups in health, sustainability or social ventures.

For over a century, public health has provided a solid scientific framework to assess the causes and consequences of harmful policies and behaviors endangering the health of populations. Yet, in an increasingly divided world, public health professionals have been confronted with the growing politicization of health policy debates, including ongoing attempts to question or limit the influence of science in government policy making. These challenges have been particularly visible in crisis situations such as the response to the COVID-19 pandemic or the latest hurricanes affecting large numbers of people and communities.

Climate change puts pressure on conceptualizations of place, world, and planet. As humans confront the force of the non-human world and the planetary scale of the crisis, we must also contend with the ambivalent legacies of both place and planet.

In an effort to draw general lessons for those interested in making change, we will assess a range of political and legal approaches; examine mass movements and the leadership by organizations, governments, and individuals; and attempt to gauge outcomes.