University College London

The use of nanotechnology in medicine is an emerging field that can revolutionize the treatment and detection of disease. Through hands-on laboratory sessions, workshops, and lectures by world-leading researchers and active clinicians, this course offers both an insight into these emerging technologies and a fundamental understanding of why size matters and how nanoscale technologies interact with biological environments. Students visit the nanoscale quantum universe, and see how nanoscale objects can be tuned for disease targeting. 

This course is a dynamic exploration of William Shakespeare’s London and literature inspired by and set in his city. The course is designed introduces students to the historical and cultural milieu of 16th and 17th-century London through a variety of genres, including drama, prose, verse, and broadside ballads. Historical accounts, artefacts, and maps provide context to the rich material for critical reading offered by these texts. Students learn about historical research methodologies while sharpening their literary close reading skills. 

This course explores and identifies why engineering is essential to the modern world. Students learn how engineers draw on scientific knowledge, research techniques, technical know-how, skills and collective experiences as well as societal facts and values to solve problems of any size or complexity. Within the interplay of these factors, many life-changing decisions and engineering solutions cannot be made using only calculations but require sound thinking and justifications based on often incomplete information.   

This course provides students with a thorough understanding of the functioning of financial markets. It covers topics such as the role of markets and institutions as providers of liquidity, the reasons for price volatility in financial markets, financial fragility, different types of market microstructure, and informational efficiency of financial markets.

This course examines the rise of risk-based policy-making and risk regulation for scientific, technological, and environmental developments. Students explore definitions of risk and the terminology for risk governance, (changing) perceptions and attitudes to risk in public and private organizations, as well as established and new approaches to managing and regulating risk. These issues are explored through a number of deep dive case studies and sessions from several fields: healthcare and pharmaceutical (including Covid-19), the environment and climate change, digital technologies and cyber-physical systems, and food safety. Particular attention is paid to addressing uncertainty and ambiguity, and what good governance of uncertain risks entails via models such as "planned adaptive risk regulation." 

The course provides students with a framework for understanding and analyzing the key issues involved in developing marketing strategy and conducting marketing operations on an international scale. At the heart of the course is the tension between standardization and adaptation and implications for the marketing mix.

Eukaryotic cells are characterized by the presence of intracellular organelles. Membrane trafficking is the essential process of maintaining these organelles and allowing the transport of proteins and lipids from one compartment to another and to the correct destination. This course introduces students to the world-leading research in this area taking place at UCL, and focuses on presenting a data-led accumulation of knowledge. Students will learn how to critically analyze research papers and gain experience in scientific writing and presentation.

The course explores the individual, the social context of behavior, and the relationship between the two. It encourages students to think in an interdisciplinary way by linking social psychology to other subject domains in psychology, and in particular to topics in other social science disciplines (particularly sociology). Students are presented with key theories, methods (including experimental work), concepts as well as new developments in the field of social psychology. Examples of key topics include attitudes and attitude change, social constructionism, social cognition, the self and social identity, group behavior, social influence, violence and aggression, prosocial behavior, prejudice and discrimination, and interpersonal relationships.

Throughout the 20th century, economics became more mathematical as a discipline and now requires sophisticated mathematical tools and techniques to solve problems arising in economics. The course provides students with some of the necessary mathematical background to study economics more effectively and more rewardingly. 

This course provides an understanding of metabolic processes in eukaryotes and prokaryotes. It covers areas such as strategies for cellular regulation, fed and fasting state metabolism, exercise metabolism, fat metabolism, electron transport and ATP synthesis, photosynthesis, copper/iron/zinc homoestasis in health and disease, prokaryotic metabolism of inorganic compounds (such as iron, sulphur and arsenic) and how they are controlled.