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.

How did our planet become so urban, and how can our cities be more vital, livable, and sustainable?

This course will consider filmmaking as a means to investigate and advance social justice. Bringing their own passions and perspectives, students will learn how to create films that inventively explore topics such as human rights, climate justice, public health, and racial and economic equity.

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.

This seminar examines U.S. climate and energy policy from both economic and technological perspectives. The seminar stArts with a review of the U.S. energy sector, climate science, and climate economics and policy tools. The seminar then dives into current policy issues, including power sector decarbonization policies, expediting the transition to electric vehicles, the movement by businesses to set net zero targets, the impact of climate change and the energy transition on marginalized communities, the politics of the energy transition, and the role of personal actions. The target audience is students who are committed to making a difference in how the US and the world tackles the challenge of climate change: through policy, through effecting social and political change around climate change, or through inventing or bringing to market the technological breakthroughs that will facilitate the necessary green energy transition.

What is the place of the human within nature? How are cultural concepts of what is ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ reflected in and shaped by texts from different periods? Where do our ideas about ecology and climate today have their roots? How can a text, or a film, be ‘ecological’?

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

What does it mean for us --both as a society and as individuals -- to live in a world radically remade by the human hand?

This research seminar examines the impacts of globalization on attempts to address key social, political, and environmental problems, including climate change, focusing in particular on the roles played by multinational corporations.

The key themes are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, gender dynamics, climate and environmental issues, religion and secularism, Holocaust remembrance, and Israeli collective memory and trauma, all through the prism of Israeli documentary filmmaking.

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

The relations between human beings and the non-human world have never seemed as urgent or troubled as today. Or so it seems. Every crisis we confront—climate change, extinctions, invasive species, energy, regulation, and more—has a deep and complex history. We have arrived at our anthropocenic present through a series of human choices, made within the constraints imposed by the non-human world in which we live. Environmental history studies this past. We aim to craft historical narratives that focus on "nature"—as a set of biological processes and systems, the object of changing political economies, and a site for cultural meaning-making.