Health Sciences

This course introduces students to global health by exploring the history of global health, the global disease burden, topical issues in health and development, and key interventions to improve health worldwide. At the same time, this course helps students understand how different disciplines - such as economics, political science, and anthropology - relate to global health.

This is an individual study project. Students must have a well thought-through idea of the theme of the study. A faculty teacher is appointed as supervisor, and an agreement is signed between the student and the teacher describing the title, contents, and ECTS credits of the study. A supervisor normally meets with the student between two and four times to discuss the progress of the individual study, or any problems encountered. Most supervisors also choose to read and comment on parts of the study. Students applying to do an individual study must submit a detailed project description with their application. Exams for Individual Study Projects may be oral, written or a combination of the two. This version of the course is worth 12 quarter units and corresponds to a workload of 412 hours. 

This course teaches the importance of strategic management in today’s health care organizations. Effective strategic thinking, planning, and managing strategic momentum are essential for health care leaders in coping with the dynamics of the industry. The course content is structured around the nature, functions, and major concepts of strategic management.

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.