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 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 provide formal definition, as well as quantitative and qualitative measurement tools utilized in this emerging area of study that intersects environmental health with implementation, effectiveness, and dissemination science. Some of the key concepts that will be discussed in this course are risk communication, health literacy, and numeracy. Furthermore, students will learn the principles for how to communicate environmental health science in a way that is equitable, rigorous, and accessible for the public based on principles of EHL.
The nutritional health of the public begins with food. There are two goals of this course: (1) To learn the basics of food science and technology, including food composition, chemistry, processing, and engineering; and (2) to understand how the broader food environment, including agricultural practices, food policy, and food trade, affects food availability and consumption. Through lectures, discussions, and group projects, students will be challenged to think critically about how the food supply impacts public health.
This course will explore the long history of theorizing about the impact of the environment on health, paying particular attention to changing climates: what happens when people travel to new climates, and what happens when a place’s climate changes.
This course will examine methodological issues associated with the design and execution of studies designed to measure environmental exposure to chemical and biological contaminants.
The intersection of environment and health is by necessity an interdisciplinary focus. The most promising advances in lung biology and respiratory disease are resulting from teams of scientists with diverse disciplinary training, including biology, medicine, engineering, and physics. In addition to a strong foundation in a specific discipline, the ability to recognize and act upon opportunities presented by outside disciplines is a crucial skill. This course is designed to train scientists to approach lung biology and respiratory diseases with an interdisciplinary perspective, in particular by bridging the gap between life sciences and physical/engineering sciences.
The course is an introduction to the field of global mental health. The curriculum is primarily informed by the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health & Sustainable Development (2018) (https://www.thelancet.com/commissions/global-mental-health) which proposed a re-framing of mental health in three key ways: adopting a dimensional approach to mental health; recognizing the convergence of social and biological determinants in the emergence of mental health problems; and realizing a rights based approach to mental health.
Through this course, participants will learn how to study the influence of built and natural environments on an array of health outcomes, receive a basic introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (no prior knowledge required), will learn to assess the evidence behind different associations observed in the literature, and will explore the policy and decision-making processes that facilitate built and natural environment changes.
This course is designed to expose students to the theory and practice of innovation and entrepreneurship in health care settings, both domestically and abroad.
This course is a survey to introduce core concepts and tools of disease eradication. We will discuss the current tools (or lack of tools), the evidence for their effective use, and their successes and failures, and we will discuss the policies and programs required to effectively use these tools for infectious disease control and eradication.
Through a series of lectures and conversations with practitioners, the course will address how health care professionals and public health researchers can engage with policy makers to better communicate urgency and provide solutions that advance health equity. It will also offer some strategies and tools for effective community organizing and clear science communication on environmental justice and climate action.
The past decade has brought dynamism, complexity, and growth in health organizations, from integrated care delivery systems to multi-service nonprofits. As a result, healthcare work settings are increasingly fast paced, interdependent and uncertain – and COVID-19 has greatly intensified these trends. These conditions make management and organizational behavior ever more critical to performance. How can leaders help their organizations and teams to thrive in such dynamic settings? How can they simultaneously organize for tight execution and innovation, build resilience in the face of crisis, achieve influence amid limited authority, and treat people respectfully without burning out? These are questions of organizational behavior and theory.
