English

One of the big challenges in psychology is to understand how elements of the nervous system, such as neurons, can cooperate to produce high-level operations like perceiving, thinking, acting and consciousness. This course introduces students to biological psychology by way of studying the link between the brain and behavior. Students gain an understanding of how the brain is involved in everything we do; whether it be recognizing faces, getting a good night's sleep or remembering where you left the car keys. The course consists of: Historical Perspectives and The Big Questions; Measuring Brain and Behavior; The Developing Brain; Movement & Action; Sensation and Perception; Executive Functions; Sleep & Dreaming.

In contemporary cinema and media studies, few concepts are invoked as often the ‘the digital’. Despite our familiarity with the term, the issues associated with it are complex and part of a much longer relationship between media, technology, and production practices. To address these issues from a theoretical and practical perspective, this course explores a range of topics related to digital aesthetics, data, bodies and performers. Across the course, students engage in related practical tasks that provide an experiential form of understanding and encourage embodied reflection on the topics under focus. The tasks offer students increased awareness of the range of easily accessed digital tools, and instill increased confidence when it comes to incorporating such tools into practice-based work.

In the high and late middle ages, monarchs and urban governments across Europe enacted laws dictating what people could wear, what hairstyles they could have, what they could eat, what types of hawks they could hunt with, as well as creating a range of other restrictions on visual display. This course examines why. What was the purpose of these ‘sumptuary’ laws (as historians have named them)? What conditions led to their enactment? How did they differ across time and space? What types of people were regulated and who was allowed to dress as they pleased? Through weekly seminars, students interrogate these questions of the original sources and select a subset of sumptuary law to examine in their essay.

This course provides undergraduate students with basic knowledge of how to conduct empirical research on international relations (IR). The course is organized into two sections. The first section introduces academic writing skills, instructing on how to formulate research questions; implement literature reviews, and prepare an appropriate research design. Given the emerging challenges of artificial intelligence (AI), the class also discusses how to use and avoid the misuse of AI in academic writing. The second section illustrates how to use a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, including surveys and interviews.  

This course introduces the fundamental concepts from mechanical engineering that facilitates understanding and quantitative analysis of renewable energy systems. This includes concepts from the fields of structural mechanics, dynamics of mechanical systems, and fluid statics/dynamics. The course provides a grounding in key physical concepts and analytical methods to enable understanding of and quantitative analysis of renewable energy systems. Lecture material will cover: structural mechanics; Newtonian Dynamics; and fluid statics and dynamics. These are presented within the context of and applied to renewable energy systems

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course focuses on advanced methods and models to predict the vulnerability of a water body to natural and anthropic pressures and evaluate the risk of water scarcity or poor quality under current and future conditions. In particular, the course addresses the following main contents: analytical and numerical models of flow and contaminant transport, data-driven and risk assessment methods, and laws of similarity for model tests in hydraulics. It is divided into two modules: 

Module 1: 

• Analytical and numerical modeling of flow processes in natural domains
• Analytical and numerical modeling of transport processes
• Risk and sensitivity analysis
• Monitoring and data-driven methods for the analysis of water bodies
• Introduction to geostatistics

Module 2: 

• Dimensionless numbers and laws of similarity for model tests in hydraulics
• Hydraulic measurements

This course explores the origins and development of the Heavy Metal genre, from its beginnings in classic and hard rock through to contemporary forms. The aesthetics of the genre are also discussed, and some focus is given to some of the more prominent movements within the genre, such as the NWoBHM (new wave of British heavy metal), death metal, and black metal.

The long-run economic development of countries, as well as inequality within countries are the major topics of this course. The course reviews the major conceptual approaches to economic development and applies those to the actual experience of countries. In this way, the global variety of development experiences becomes a central topic of the course, addressing topics such as investment, trade, building institutions, population dynamics, education, health, and migration. The material that we cover suggests that inequality of the distribution of income resulting from differences across the population in terms of access to education, health services, or infrastructure can be a major obstacle to economic development. Throughout the course, public policy options for stimulating development are made central, especially in the assignment that students carry out.  Prerequisite SSC1027 Principles of Economics. Knowledge of basic quantitative concepts such as reading and working with graphs and simple equations is also a prerequisite

This course covers the process of bioinformatics data analysis and the interpretation of the results in a biological context. The following topics will be addressed in the course: command line usage; programming/scripting; current bioinformatics data analysis tools; and automated analysis pipelines. The first part of the course covers command line usage (linux), bioinformatics script programming (python), as well as the theory and tools required to analyze data produced by current sequencing technologies and interpret the results. Topics include genome assembly, sequence annotation, gene expression, biological networks, and comparative genomics. During the second part of the course, students - in teams - apply their knowledge in a small research project. Given a specific biological question and the required data, the goal is to build a data analysis pipeline and describe the biological interpretation. BIF20306 Introduction to Bioinformatics or SSB34306 Computational Biology and BIF21806 Practical Computing for Biologists or INF2306 Programming in Python required.

This course provides students with a solid understanding of the key aspects in energy metabolism, and the effects of nutrients on (muscle) metabolism during exercise of different types. The course requires prior knowledge on some basic biochemical concepts (e.g. the structure and function of macromolecules, common forms of chemical reactions, basic cell structure, and metabolism of macromolecules). The course builds around a practical case study. With a group of students, develop a cohesive and evidence-based recommendation regarding nutrition and exercise for a client sports team. The first part of the course provides a theoretical foundation on the basics of exercise physiology and biochemistry. In the form of tutorial groups, discuss the physiology of muscles, the metabolism of macronutrients, the hormonal regulation of metabolism, the biochemical and physiological role of macro- and micronutrients in relation to exercise and fatigue, and adaptations of the body to endurance, and resistance training. You are expected to conduct a further search of the literature, as the theoretical foundation covers only part of the concepts important for developing a cohesive recommendation regarding nutrition and exercise. Prerequisite SCI2035 Biochemistry. Recommended SCI2009 Human Physiology and/or, SCI2037 Cell Biology.