English

This course examines the fundamental processes of ecology and evolution that bear on the nature and diversity of organisms and the processes that govern their assembly into ecological communities and their roles in ecosystem function.

This course examines topics in physical and inorganic chemistry. It covers atoms and the periodic table; chemical bonding; reduction and oxidation reactions; properties of gases; introduction to thermodynamics; kinetics; chemical equilibrium; Gibbs energy and the second law of thermodynamics; aqueous chemistry; acid-base equilibrium.

This course is an overview of theoretical constructs and practical applications of leadership. Through readings, videos, assignments, and purposeful experiential missions, the course guides students in developing individual approaches to effective leadership. It provides a bridge between the Mexico and Sacramento halves of the program and has the following objectives:

1. To stimulate meaningful reflection for the participants in the Leadership in Social Justice & Public Policy program
2. To introduce and examine historical, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives of leadership
3. To explore practical applications of leadership theories
4. To assess and strengthen leadership skills and abilities
5. To understand how social identities influence leadership

This course gives students the opportunity to improve their ability to build and manage constructive relationships and to get to high value added results managing not only their own, but also other people's performance. The determinants of optimal performance, that is competence, motivation, and positive psychological states, are explored with the aim of both improving the ability to engage oneself and the people they are working with, and the effectiveness when managing problem/underperforming people. Leadership skills gives students the opportunity to reflect and act upon change: change is one of the relevant dimensions of leadership and becoming a leader requires students to go through a personal and professional transition. This course provides the resources needed to specifically manage the transition from Individual Contributor to Manager, encouraging a greater self-awareness and therefore increased effectiveness. This course covers the main theories of leadership: trait, situational approach, transactional, transformational and charismatic leadership; the dark side of leadership. It also covers leadership skills: influence, integration of differences, compelling communication, leading for excellent performance. Other topics covered include: designing and leading teams; minorities, women, and leadership; organizational culture and leadership in multicultural environments. Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of organizational behavior.

This course provides an introduction to the analysis of discourse and dialogue. It discusses the major theoretical and methodological areas of study in discourse analysis from functional and socio-cognitive perspectives as well as applications in mediated, multimodal, and computational/corpus-assisted settings. 

This course studies the origin and evolution of national, ethnic and supranational identities, social and economic determinants of attitudes towards immigration, and the process of changing cultural values. Ethno-territorial conflicts in the contemporary world and the debate on the clash of cultures are covered, as well as the cultural dimension of regional integration processes, such as the case of the European Union.

The course gives an overview of physiological functions in humans and other mammals. It provides an understanding of how the human body functions, and forms the foundation of our understanding of biomedical disciplines.

This course looks at the challenges and techniques involved in programming multicore systems. The course starts out with a brief history of computing to motivate the shift to multicore architectures. Parallelism, execution indeterminism, thread-and-lock-based programming, non-blocking synchronization, and HW acceleration with GPGPUs are introduced in a step-by-step approach that is accompanied by individual programming assignments. The impact of hardware architectures on programmability and performance is highlighted. Emerging trends such as Stream-parallel programming and hardware transactional memory are introduced. 

This course provides a study of artistic movements that have taken place in Spain from the 16th century to the present day. It analyzes the stylistic characteristics of the Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, Cubism and Surrealism. Particular attention is give to Spanish art within the European context, as well aspects of patronage or the art market. The course includes an examination of fundamental Spanish artists such as El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Picasso or Dalí, and their works in relation with artists from other European geographical areas.