Health Sciences

This course examines health economics and policy. Topics include health insurance regulation, physician pricing, hospital pricing, and the value of health.

This course introduces complex biological systems and their relationship with human health and the environment. It also provides general information for a clinical understanding of medical science. 

This is a course that focuses on student wellbeing, personal growth, and coping with stress, so that students can equip themselves with lifelong skills for learning, working, and being well. Students learn how to thrive in university life and beyond - including leadership skills for future employment - through fostering physical, cognitive, emotional, and social skills that will support their wellbeing. The course is delivered in the context of our digital world: understanding data and finding digital supports and strategies for life management. Expert speakers join for sessions around areas such as nutrition, sleep, and mental health, and students track their own personal data and progress in areas of their choice (e.g. emotional wellbeing, study habits, time management, exercise). 

This course builds an intellectual scaffolding for understanding human anatomy and physiology. The course approaches the subject with an evolutionary and comparative lens so that proximate "how" questions are understood in concert with ultimate "why" questions. Major themes include homeostasis among physiological systems; homology among structures and processes; seeing suboptimal or pathological adaptive solutions as the product of phylogenetic constraints or physiological trade-offs; and human adaptive plasticity in diverse environments. The course pays particular attention to chronic and metabolic pathologies in contemporary urban societies.

This course studies fundamental biology and problems of medicine, medical treatments, and environments.

Society is currently flooded with too much information about health, disease, exercise, nutrition, and how humans should behave to be healthy. This course is designed to develop one’s knowledge of the human body and to help one gain a scientific view of what health really means. The program focuses on the different biomolecules, cells, and systems that work together to keep one alive and healthy.  Instead of using medical jargon, the instructor will illustrate core concepts of physiology and biochemistry in “lay terms” throughout the course. 

Memory is a property of the living brain and operationally it is defined at the behavioral level. For the mechanistic analysis of memory it is important to distinguish between processes, such as memory consolidation and memory retrieval. In mammals, there are independent memory systems that involve distinct brain regions. Neuronal networks establish memories in the brain and distinct molecular and cellular processes within individual neurons are fundamental for memory. In this course, students study state-of-the-art knowledge of memory mechanisms at the molecular, cellular, network, anatomical and behavioral level. Students learn which experimental approaches are being applied to investigate these memory mechanism and they learn to critically reflect on these investigations. The course also covers how diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, affect memory mechanisms, and how memory abilities may be improved with pharmacological treatments.

This course provides a study of basic medical terminology. It covers a simple method of analyzing medical terms, roots, suffixes, prefixes, and the terms associated with each body system. It also covers basic anatomy and physiology.

This version of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience includes an Independent Study Project (ISP) done under the direction of the instructor. The minimum reading is between 20 and 25 articles from established academic periodicals/magazines. The ISP is 10-12 pages and counts for 1/3 of the overall grade for the course. In this course, students learn to use neuroscience methods to study the cognitive development of infants, children, and adolescents. The course begins with the various methods used in developmental cognitive neuroscience, such as pediatric and infant MRI, EEG, and fNIRS. In this context, students uncover and discuss the benefits and challenges of each approach and the feasibility of studying different age ranges. The course then examines typical brain development as assessed with in vivo MRI (including trajectories of white & gray matter over the life span). Next, are more specific aspects of cognitive development such as the development of visual processes where students learn how learning to read affects the brain and how regions involved in face processing develop throughout childhood to support important social functions such as face recognition. Topics are approached using a mix of formats including active participation, working in subgroups, presentations, short lectures, and videos.

This course examines how GIS is used to address and analyze pressing health problems from the geographical perspective. It covers such topics as theoretical and practical issues, simple disease mapping, disease pattern analysis, and environmental association through spatia modeling techniques. 

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.