Health Sciences

This course offers a comprehensive understanding of how pathogens emerge, evolve and spread as well as an insight into the cutting-edge tools applied in their study and measures for their control. The course moves from pathogen-related genetic factors that enable pathogens to adapt to new hosts or acquire antibiotic resistance that make them so difficult to treat, through to ecological and host factors such as intensive agriculture, and climate change that bring us in to contact with new diseases.

This course introduces the fundamental concepts in Chinese medicine to provide a general understanding of the basic theories, working principles, methods for health preservation and disease healing in Chinese medicine. The course comprises an introduction to the five key areas in Chinese medicine including the basic theories of Chinese medicine, methods of diagnosis and treatment, acupuncture and moxibustion, Chinese medicinal materials, and Chinese herbal formulary. This course features a half-day visit to the Chinese Medicine Clinical Research and Services Centre, TWGHs Kwong Wah Hospital–The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Chinese medicine is being practiced in a contemporary context.

This course goes beyond conventional lecture-based instruction and to the heart of the research process. Through hands-on scanning, data analysis, literature exploration, and seminar participation, students learn how MRI and fMRI are used to investigate the human brain – and apply knowledge to design, conduct, and present neuroimaging projects. The course integrates foundational concepts in neuroimaging and clinical neuroscience through hands-on, research-based learning. Through this process, students gain practical experience with MRI hardware and scanning, experimental design, basic image processing, and scientific writing and presentation.

This course focuses on the interdisciplinary studies fields of public and global health, especially the contribution made to them by social sciences like political economy and medical sociology. The course addresses how our health is shaped by factors such as class, gender, race, profit-seeking behavior, climate change, and technology; it also questions what constitutes "medicine" and what role it plays in society, and how health policy shapes and is shaped by these considerations.

This course introduces the core principles of neuroscience and translation, including the core structural and functional principles of the brain. It provides a deep-dive into neurological disease from molecular, cellular, and clinical perspectives and with clinically oriented sessions offered including cadaveric anatomy, neuroimaging, and patient-facing skill building. It offers hands-on laboratory practical experience in molecular and cellular techniques, supported by focused workshops and seminars.

This course provides an understanding of the ecological and evolutionary principles that underly disease symptoms, emergence, and outbreak. Though a series of lectures, supplemented with practical lessons the course explores how natural selection acts on hosts and their pathogens, what factors facilitate disease outbreaks, and how we might prevent pathogens from escaping our control. Using examples in human medicine, animals, and plants the course explores: why people get sick; how diseases emerge; super spreaders, individuals who generate many infections; how global warming can alter the interaction between diseases and their hosts; the evolution of antibiotic resistance and the evolution virulence; evolution proofing drugs; and many other concepts in evolutionary medicine, ecology, and evolution.

This course examines ethical considerations and issues central to public health and healthcare. The course analyzes ethical theories and principles and applies them to healthcare and public health contexts. It examines the ethical challenges involved in balancing individual and community interests within healthcare systems that are costly, complex, and increasingly globalized.

This course introduces the fascinating world of Sensory Science, where humans are the ultimate instruments to experience and evaluate food quality. It covers the senses, how to use them to perform sensory evaluation of foods, how to choose between different sensory methods and panels, and how to analyze sensory data in a meaningful way. The course discusses general principles of sensory measurements (discrimination, ranking and scaling), pitfalls in sensory evaluation (carry-over effects, response biases, etc.) and how to deal with them in experimental settings. Special attention is on performing difference tests, descriptive profiling and consumer acceptance tests, the challenges in the sensory laboratory and working with sensory panels, as well as data analysis (e.g. checking panel performance and product differences). The course also looks at how to relate descriptive data with instrumental analyses of foods and emerging tools for descriptive analysis (e.g. machine learning applications). Finally, it introduces the wider implications of changing sensory quality for food reward and nutrition behavior. Besides lectures. the course includes hands-on sensory exercises where students learn about their own senses, and work in groups on different methods for sensory evaluation. It arranges “dry” exercises to work with course materials and sensory data to get confident in applying your sensory skills.

This course focuses on the basics of nutrition and exercise for health and wellbeing, teaching the fundamentals of designing exercise and physical activity programs and using nutrition to enhance exercise and sports performance. It develops an understanding of how exercise and nutrition relate to health outcomes, including the role of diet in chronic disease and obesity. 

This course introduces epidemiological principles and methods, including basic tools for measuring illness and risk factors in the population, interpreting and assessing the quality of scientific health evidence by critiquing a range of study designs, and reporting on epidemiological research.