Tropospheric and stratospheric gas and aerosol chemistry. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and mercury cycles. Implications for climate change, air quality, ecosystems.

The seminar will consist of three weekend field trips (Friday evening through Sunday afternoon) to Harvard Forest and a final mini symposium (Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon) at the Harvard Forest. The seminar will acquaint students with our current knowledge about global change, drawing upon state-of-the-art research, tools, and measurements used in evaluating and predicting climate change through ongoing studies at the Harvard Forest’s 4,000-acre outdoor classroom and laboratory in Petersham, Massachusetts. Students will spend the weekends at the Harvard Forest (HF) in comfortable accommodations with round-trip travel and meals provided. Through readings, informal discussions, and field excursions, students will become versed in the ecological concepts related to global change, and the science behind current predictions for future climate scenarios. 

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 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 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.

Dealing with the impacts of climate change is just one example of a challenging public policy problem HKS students may face in their careers. Policy Design and Delivery (PDD) will teach you the skills necessary to address a wide range of issues and to craft options for change.

This proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, both spatially and socially – how it becomes legible and desirable, who gets the right to create it and for whom.