English

This course introduces population issues, concepts, theories and methods by encompassing the entire field of demography, including principle and practice. It offers an overview of various aspects of demographic growth and transition relating to changes in health and mortality, fertility, migration, age structure, urbanization, family and household structure. This course examines the relations between population and development and their potential consequences from a sociological, economic and geographical perspective. Other topics include global variation in population size and growth, various demographic perspectives and their modern implications, environmental impacts, and population policy. Special emphasis is placed on demographic transition in Hong Kong and its neighborhood region.

This course is concerned with how people, governments, organizations, and businesses understand environmental problems, negotiate interests, create policies, and implement solutions. It blends environmental studies, political science, political theory, law, social psychology, and economics. Its central aim is to analyze the structures and mechanics of power, knowledge, solidarity, cooperation, disagreement, and conflict as they are operate in different societies and at different scales of social organization. 

Its focus is on Italian environmental politics, which provides a complex case study given the many urgent issues Italy has to confront (including accelerating climate change, energy dependence, new challenges to food and urban systems, pollution, and rapid ecosystemic transformation and landscape degradation), its peculiarities (including its morphology, its centrality in the Mediterranean region, the constant entanglements between natural and cultural heritage on its territory, and the long shadow of criminal activities profiting at the expense of localities), its pugnacious, multilayered politics and highly bureaucratized policy-making, high levels of internal socio-economic and cultural diversity, and its evolving international relations.   

The course asks questions like: who and what causes environmental problems, and how? Who is affected? Who decides what should be done, in whose name, and with what authority? What power do different actors have? What values guide environmental policy? How do national and local environmental policy-makers interact with regional and international institutions?

This course provides an in-depth exploration of fundamental and emerging concepts in cancer biology through a combination of lectures, student-led seminars, and hands-on laboratory work. It is designed to develop both theoretical knowledge and critical analysis skills essential for understanding cancer mechanisms and research methodologies. Topics include: cell cycle; chromosome segregation; cell-matrix interactions; cell death; Ubiquitin-Proteasome System; asymmetric cell division; DNA replication; signaling pathways; tumor microenvironment; energy metabolism; stem cells; biosynthetic pathways. 

This course discusses the fundamentals of machine design as accuracy, strength, reliability, function and performance of typical mechanical elements. 

This course explores how games such as Ghost of Tsushima and Rise of the Rōnin have become one of the key vehicles through which people in Japan and across the world encounter the samurai and compares these depictions to historical realities. Students investigate how and why the samurai emerged as a distinct group, how they changed across Japan’s long history and the evolving and selective nature of samurai representations. As a final project, students collaborate to design their own samurai-themed video games.

This course examines how attitudes toward death and the management of the dead transformed during the 19th and 20th centuries. It explores the effects of scientific and medical developments, secularization, imperial expansion, nationalism, and urbanization on how societies understood death and treated the dead. Through comparative case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America, the course considers whether death has become increasingly invisible in the modern age and whether the dead continue to hold sacred or social power. Emphasis is placed on analyzing historical sources to uncover past emotions, attitudes, and cultural norms surrounding death.

This class provides the opportunity to work with a mentor; promote a new token-economy product (business model and service); create its prototype, and conduct a final presentation with peers. In preparation, the class comprises of lectures on blockchains, Web3, DeFi (Decentralised Finance), DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) and X to Eaern as well as instructions on how to use Figma and NetLogo.  

This course provides opportunities for students to formulate international cooperation and global governance strategies, while considering characteristics of specific globalization challenges. The course aims to understand the relevant actors or agents in international cooperation for development, including their diverse instruments and modalities. The class evaluates causes, consequences and interests of the actors involved in international cooperation and global governance, then they design international cooperation and global governance strategies, seeking a fairer distribution of power.

The course requires prior knowledge in the evolution of the international system as well as International Relations theories. 

This course provides students with detailed insight into the fundamental workings of the nervous system. Students focus on the relationship between the structure and function of the cellular and sub-cellular components of neurons, and on mechanisms that underlie information signaling. Examples of nervous system disorders illustrate the sensitivity of neurons and circuits, as well as the often-catastrophic consequences on brain function. Students learn to identify and communicate key principles that are essential to understanding neuroscience. Topics include: signaling by neurons and synapses, neurotransmission and information coding, nervous system plasticity, cellular and molecular basis of learning and memory, fundamental disease mechanisms, and methodological approaches.

The course unit focuses on the historical development of psychology as a science and the way in which earlier philosophical ideas were transformed within the context of psychology, leading to the different approaches to psychology that can be discerned throughout its history. It also deals with the philosophy of science and consider how science develops over time, the extent to which one can define a scientific method, and the extent to which psychology exemplifies the characteristics of scientific method. Finally, it deals with the development of philosophical ideas about the mind that later fed into psychology.