Health Sciences

This course focuses on contemporary global health issues, with emphasis placed on contextualizing global, national, and subnational health disparities. Students study how health, the environment, and sustainable development are interrelated and work to improve our understanding of both policy and practice. Therefore, students are introduced to important actors and their stated goals. Students examine cases from low- and middle-income countries, as well as from high-income countries. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach, using various perspectives including sociology, bioethics, epidemiology, anthropology, clinical medicine, and political science. 

The course focuses on understanding the interaction among diets, nutrients, genetics and metabolism from molecular mechanisms to interventions.

This course introduces the five core “pillars” of public health practice: biostatistics, epidemiology, environmental health, health policy and management, and social and behavioral sciences. While many public health professionals specialize in one of these areas, a well-rounded understanding across these pillars is essential to public health practice. Lectures and seminars cover key concepts and real-world examples with seminars focusing on the critical evaluation of real studies within each core area. The second part of the course focuses on applying these skills to case studies covering key public health issues from around the world.