Netherlands

Global Health is the research and practice of improving health and wellbeing worldwide. Health has many determinants, and these exceed the ‘biomedical’ domain. This course uses the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals, a global agenda for 2015 to 2030 that was agreed on by the United Nations General Assembly.  Students explore major global health challenges of our time - such as Covid-19 and environmental health - and address current and desired interventions to tackle these challenges in an equitable way. As an interdisciplinary approach is required to tackle the global challenges, interprofessional collaboration and skills are practiced throughout the course.

This course examines the themes surrounding global organizational processes: how state systems work, where the desire for a global political order comes from, which institutions regulate global relations and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Are we on course for a global government, or will the rise of new centers of world power instead lead to greater fragmentation? The emphasis lies on the last hundred years, in particular on institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, and other global governance organizations. Research is conducted into the motivations behind setting up these institutions, how the interests of various individual nations (or groups of nations) were represented, and which obstacles formed an impediment to decisive governance on global issues. Attention is devoted not only to political organizations, but also to economic and cultural institutions (IMF, the World Bank, ADB), to allow students to acquire a thorough understanding of the structure of the international order and the recent developments in an increasingly polycentric world.

The course Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practices introduces students to a range of topics in the field of entrepreneurship and links both entrepreneurial theory as well as practice. Critical questions like who, why, when, and where start-ups embark on their entrepreneurial journey, are covered during this course. The course seeks to introduce the students to the vast literature about entrepreneurship and business start-ups and it challenges students to connect this literature to actual cases. The course covers aspects like entrepreneurial competences, regional eco-systems, opportunity recognition, appropriation, female and minority entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial success, etc. From a more practical standpoint, it explores how to put together an entrepreneurial team, develop approaches for evaluating the market reception, and discover the value creation potential of one’s venture idea.

This course provides a background on the essentials of planet Earth's natural dynamics, and which processes are currently altered through human activity, by explaining how geological processes have shaped the Earth into its present state, and how current human activities are interfering with natural processes in Earth's ecosystems. Why the Earth's surface looks the way it does can largely be understood from Earth's internal structure dynamics. Aspects of the Geosphere that are discussed in class include the formation of planet Earth, the rock cycle, geological time, the inner Earth, plate tectonics, deformation, mountain building, and sedimentation and sedimentary basins. Emphasis is placed on the role of geological observations as evidence of processes that contributed to shaping the surface of the Earth. In addition, the course discusses the diversity of Earth's ecosystem and the importance of conserving biodiversity. The scientific aspects of global climate change are addressed, along with the way climate change is discussed and presented in the popular media.

The course focuses on the application of techniques in the area of Operations Management. Covered topics include forecasting, material requirements planning, routing, and scheduling of assembly lines. Addressing these topics, several quantitative techniques (mostly heuristics and metaheuristics) that have shown to be successful in these areas are applied to examples and exercises. The course combines cases, exercises, and discussions, facilitated by your tutor and the students themselves. Prerequisites for this course are basic knowledge of the role and scope of operations management within business; advanced mathematical skills; ability to understand quantitative models and concepts and the application of such models and concepts; moderate level of understanding of simulation; moderate level of knowledge concerning linear programming.

This course evaluates social media use and investigates which strategies can be employed to influence communication and the ethical questions they raise. Students investigate the power of words, images, and stories. The course considers the impact of attention in social media and the role of influencers. The course discusses how language technology can help in automatically analyzing communication and get a better insight into people’s behavior and user groups. Techniques such as sentiment analysis, trend analysis, media analytics, and visualization of communication are discussed. The course focuses on how social media can be employed in our society, such as in small and large companies, in non-profit organizations, and within the government. Students learn to critically analyze existing social media strategies and to develop innovative communication strategies in one of these settings. Students also discuss the value of social media data in current algorithmic society and how data is employed to shape social behavior, generate economic value, impact political choices, and consider the privacy and ethical questions they raise.

This course presents the essentials of Biochemistry. It covers the structures, functions, and interactions of biomacromolecules, including proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, DNA, and RNA, which perform many of the activities associated with life. The course provides insight in the specificity and action of enzymes, the bio catalysts of the cell. Further, it explains metabolic pathways that result in the generation of ATP, the major energy currency of the cell. Finally recent biochemical understandings on genome editing are presented that revolutionize treatment of diseases at the level of correcting mutated genes (gene therapy). Prerequisites for this course are an introduction to biology or chemistry.