English

This course introduces the concepts, tools and techniques of bioinformatics to understand molecular evolution, individualized medicine, and data intensive biology. The course includes a conceptual framework for modern bioinformatics, an introduction to key bioinformatics topics such as databases and software, sequence analysis, pairwise alignment, multiple sequence alignment, sequence database searches, and profile-based methods, molecular phylogenetics, genomic analysis and personal genomics. Lectures include hands-on inquiry using bioinformatics tools in the practical sessions. The course requires students to take a prerequisite of General Biology. 

This course covers the period between the Predynastic and the Middle Kingdom and includes: reliefs, statuary, architecture, and minor arts, illustrated with images. It focuses on learning how to look at and to analyze Egyptian art and to place it in its context. This course involves a significant amount of memorization to create a mental data-bank that is useful when putting excavated material in context and in analyzing Egyptian art. It includes field trips to the museum and to Giza and Saqqara.

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 provides a high awareness of the specific nature of literary language both as a way through which the imaginary finds expression and as an instrument to interpret reality. Students must master interpretive tools and methodologies for text analysis. This course shows how to explore and investigate literary forms and themes in a comparative perspective, with a special focus on the relationships between different national tradition and different cultural/historical contexts, as well as the relationships between literary texts and other semiotic systems of expression (music, cinema, performance, theatre and so on). The course provides the capacity for autonomous reflection and formulating autonomous judgments on theoretical and methodological issues. In spring 2024, the course focused on objects in 19th century fiction: between realism and the fantastic. The course investigates the forms in which these phenomena manifest themselves, particularly in two fundamental modes of representation that face one another through the whole 19th century: realism and the fantastic.

This course aims to introduce students to the sociological study of social inequalities. That is, to gain a broad understanding of the social processes through which some end up having more resources than others and through which some become included and some excluded. In the introductory sessions, we will begin by defining social inequality and its relevant dimensions, learning about its trends in Europe and the world as well as its pernicious effects for society. Students will also learn key sociological concepts such as social class, social mobility, and ethnoracial categorization processes. In the second part of the course students will be introduced to some of sociology’s most studied mechanisms that help explain the perpetuation of inequalities in a wide range of contexts such as cumulative advantage, opportunity hoarding, discrimination, boundary making, and social networks. As a next step we will learn about some of the most relevant engines of inequality such as families and schools, labor markets, tax systems, extreme weather events, and migration systems. We will end the course by learning about how to tackle inequality. We will discuss how acceptance or opposition to it comes about and reflect on sociology’s relevance in addressing societal disparities.

In this course, students learn about the different conceptualizations of emotion both in terms of historical developments as well as contemporary theoretical models of emotions. The course considers the biological basis of emotions in the brain and the body, how emotions are expressed and perceived in faces, bodies, voice, and music. The relationship between emotions and cognitions is considered, including emotion regulation and individual differences in emotions. Finally, cultural differences and disorders of emotion are discussed.

This course studies basic concepts of biochemistry and chemistry of food as well as the basic principles of food science and natural products chemistry.  The course covers the following topics: food allergens; novel functions of dietary vitamins and its contribution to our health; food and bioactive natural products for human health; beneficial health effects of dietary lipids; chemistry and biochemistry of marine toxins; application of high pressure to food processing; protein chemistry; bioactive molecules and their application for drug discovery; medicinal chemistry of antibacterial and antiviral agents; synthetic and medicinal chemistry of marine natural products, and nutrient-inspired biomaterials and its applications for the health purposes. 

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's main emphasis is on cultural heritage; it offers a bridge between the past and the future by means of the present. The course investigates the formation of the concept of cultural heritage in historical perspective and the European geographical spectrum. It also dwells on the cases of destruction of cultural heritage occurring throughout history. Starting from the shaping of urban landscapes through the ages, the course also addresses the heritage values of urban space, which are overall values derived from the integration of different components. The course provides: an understanding of the significance of urban environments through the transformations that occurred over time in relation to various political and institutional phases; a comparative view between Italian and European cities through specific examples; an ability to use sources such as aerial photos of urban settlements to identify the stages of their development from antiquity to the present; and recognition of the reasons for the shaping of Europe's cultural heritage and in particular its historical urban landscape.

Participants explore software security hands-on with the goal to develop and host an international information security contest (¨Attack/Defense CTF”): contesting teams from all over the world receive virtual machines built during the project. The machines run participants’ services, containing secret tokens ("flags") that other teams have to collect over the wire using exploits as part of the game. To build the contest, participants will dive deep into the security of a platform and language of their choice and create a software project with well-hidden software vulnerabilities in this language. Furthermore, a game server will be developed as a team, including scripts to check the health of services for each contestant. As part of the development and hosting, participants will develop and extend the infrastructure required to host the competition, strengthen their skills in penetration testing and exploitation, and build upon other technical and non-technical abilities, depending on their role in the project. Such skills may include networking, continuous integration, agile development, project management and public relations. Furthermore, students develop and extend the infrastructure, required for the competition. The course gives participants the freedom to explore tools of their choice, build software and find creative ways to corrupt it, with the work done both independently and in small teams. Insecure software is a potential threat to both the industry and the democratic society. The course supports goals on sustainability by raising awareness on IT security, and teaching the ability to detect, fix and avoid security issues in software, not only for the students, but also for the international participants of the competition. Furthermore, we support open-source, by making all material publicly available in the end.

It is impossible to obtain a full picture of Japanese economic history without understanding how global and international relationships shaped the economy of the country. This course surveys recent scholarship on economic history of Japan, East Asia, and the rest of the world in the past few centuries. Most of the reading materials emphasize global and international perspectives in the analysis of economic history.  The course discusses a wide range of key topics and methodologies in the study of Japanese economic history.