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 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.
This course will introduce the students to the fundamentals of global health, in particular the main trends, challenges, opportunities and strategies. The course will will explore current knowledge base, perspectives, and methods for global health. This course is required for all Master of Public Health students in the Department of Global Health and Population.
This course examines the social and political determinants of health, focusing on historic and ongoing systems of structural discrimination and exclusion which harm health and threaten health equity. It is intended to be an introductory course and will use examples from both the United States and a number of other countries/regions to explore how power and politics shape health and health equity.
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 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.
The course will provide an introduction to the foundational concepts and emerging issues essential for understanding and engaging in humanitarian and human rights research and action. The course will prepare students to understand and engage in humanitarian response and human rights protection, while examining emerging critical challenges that have multi-dimensional global impacts
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.
