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’?

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 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

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.

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 case studies, this course will explore the range of paradigmatic design responses to the climate crisis.

In this interdisciplinary course, students will analyze urban development projects and policies in the United States and internationally. They will develop recommendations for how these organizations could better integrate climate change considerations into their work. Through lectures, discussions, interviews, mentorship chats, and guest speakers, students will explore topics such as building retrofits, strategic relocation, revised land use regulations, grey and green infrastructure, building-scale emissions limits, energy efficiency retrofits, renewable energy deployment, and building electrification.