University of Copenhagen

This course is a study of theoretical and experimental work on enzymes, proteins, and peptides in biological matrices. There is an emphasis on experimental and theoretical understanding between structure and properties of the molecules. Concepts covered include extraction techniques, chromatographic systems, and solvent and buffer relations. Students develop an understanding of the properties of biomolecules (especially enzymes), strategies for efficient isolation and purification of enzymes from complex biological systems, analytical techniques used in biochemistry and for enzyme characterization, and the theoretical basis for changes of water as solvent, extraction, and chromatographic systems. Students evaluate the detection, quantification, and linearity of experimental data in relationship to published values, design experimental strategies in analytical biochemistry and enzymology, apply theoretical principles of analytical biochemistry to carry out experimental isolation and purification of enzymes, and evaluate the performance of applied techniques in an enzyme related project carried out in a group.

In computing, there is continual tension between time usage and space usage, and what can be computed and what cannot be computed at all. The purpose of this course is to explore these issues. Topics covered include: regular languages; context-free language; Turing machines; decidability; reducibility; complexity; complexity classes (P, NP, PSPACE, EXPSPACE, L, and NL); intractability. Also covered in this course are: computational models such as finite automata, pushdown automata, and Turing machines, the languages recognized by some of these models, and techniques for showing their limitations, such as the pumping lemmas for regular and for context-free languages; the power and limits of algorithmic solvability, with focus on the computationally unsolvable Halting problem; the reducibility method for proving that additional problems are computationally unsolvable; how to analyze algorithms and their time and space complexity and how to classify problems according to the amount of time and space required to solve them; known computational problems that are solvable in principle but not in practice, i.e., intractable problems. Students obtain the following skills; reading and writing specifications of languages using computational models and grammars; classifying given languages according to type (regular, context-free, etc.) and algorithmic problems according to complexity (time and space); showing the equivalence between certain machine models; presenting the relevant constructions and proofs in writing, using precise terminology and an appropriate level of technical detail. Prerequisites: Basic algorithms and discrete mathematics course(s).

This course on conflict analysis and negotiation design offers valuable knowledge and skills to students in fields involving the environment, land use, urban planning, or natural resource management. In order to prepare for a profession involving public policy decision making, a process which involves negotiation of scientific knowledge against values, concerns, and conflicting interests of the public, students are provided with skills to tailor a negotiation process at both the personal and process level to a specific conflict. Themes covered in this course include discourse, culture, institutions, power, capacity, incentives, cognition, and several social psychological factors. Additionally, students learn that a universal approach to conflict management is not equally effective in different countries, and that they must educate themselves on the political culture and social values of the people with whom they are working in order to find success in natural resource decision making. Students practice implementing their knowledge and skills through group discussions as well as an individual project report on a real life case of their choosing.

This course looks at the nexus of identities, digital data and technologies, and methods, drawing on literature from anthropology, social data science, science and technology studies, and related fields. The course considers how identities have creatively flourished, but also provides a critical interrogation of how gender, race, and other forms of difference and inequality are reproduced in and through digital data and technologies. This course begins with considering the history of digital data and technologies, and the methods and tools used to understand digital identities from the fields of anthropology and data science. This includes examining differing approaches to ethics in these fields. The course also explores theories about identity and different ways identities are constructed and performed through digital technologies, such as social media, internet cultures, and fitness trackers. It also explores the identities of those who design and build these technologies, the politics and norms reproduced through technologies themselves, and the effects they have with particular attention to the role of gender and race. Finally, the political economic contexts of these technologies and the formation of digital identities are considered.

The course focuses on the international systems for the protection of human rights. Its purpose is to make students familiar with the institutional mechanisms and substantive provisions in force at the global and regional levels to protect human rights in the United Nations, European, American and African regimes of protection. The class addresses the key challenges in current international human rights law through a number of thematic explorations of topical issue areas and clusters of complementary rights and obligations. Throughout the semester, the class is required to discuss and provide critical perspectives on the case law of international courts and tribunals in light of theoretical and academic perspectives. Students also consider the institutional viability of the current regime(s) and the opportunities and difficulties of pushing forward the overall normative agenda of international human rights law.

Health policy is a core component of western welfare states. It is also a very complex and contested policy field where hierarchical, market, clan, and network based governance forms meet and sometimes conflict. A diverse range of national and international actors influence health policymaking. This seminar provides an introduction to comparative health policy analysis as a method for analyzing and comparing health systems. Nordic health systems are used as case examples, but comparisons are made to other types of health systems in Europe. Theories from comparative health policy, public administration, and health economics are presented as frameworks for analyzing differences and similarities.

This course is a study of the foreign policy of post-Soviet Russia and its neighbors, and it provides an overview of international relations in this region. It argues that in order to better understand the behavior of post-Soviet states in the international arena, students must examine not only political, but also cultural, historical, and religious phenomena. This course focuses on factors shaping the collective identities of international actors, including the role of Orthodox Christianity, dominant ideologies, geography and perception of space, literature, arts, and creative imagination.

This course covers the following: sequences of random variables, almost sure convergence, Kolmogorov's 0-1 law; the strong law of large numbers; weak convergence of probability measures; characteristic functions; the central limit theorem; triangular arrays and Lindebergs condition; the multivariate central limit theorem; the ergodic theorem.

Using theories and analytical tools from microeconomics and macroeconomics, this course introduces the basic economic concepts relevant for analyzing problems and policies relating to the environment, natural resources, and climate change. Students learn concepts related to the central economic services provided by the environment, the basic theory of optimal management of natural resources, the distinction between weak and strong sustainability, the basic principles for valuation of environmental goods and services, the theory of the environment as a public good, and more. Students apply the standard mathematical method for static optimization subject to constraints to analyze environmental policy problems such as the determination of the optimal level of pollution abatement and the optimal environmental tax rates. This course also covers the application of optimal control theory to solve dynamic optimization problems subject to constraints such as the determination of the optimal extraction of natural resources and the optimal pace of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Students explain and present central parts of economic theories and models of the environment, natural resources, and climate change, and apply the theoretical and empirical insights from the course in a critical analysis and discussion of important real-world problems of environmental and climate policy.

This course is primarily about contemporary British novels and the social concerns that they represent and raise in practice. In particular, the course considers the structure of British class society, and how the history of this structure has influenced, been represented in, and been resisted in fiction. Students think closely about the novel and the way it has emerged. Many of the twenty-first century novels covered in this course explicitly struggle to re-write the past, but in doing so they testify in interesting ways to its influence over the future, thus the course considers literature's role in the process of social change. In this light, students have an opportunity to look at some of the most influential British literary theory of the twentieth century (by Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Alan Sinfield) as a defense of literature's role, not just in representing, but in changing the world it describes.