Health Sciences

The course covers the basic principles of drug mechanism at the molecular level and overall understanding of drug discovery and development. This course topics include: structure analysis of drug targets, physicochemical properties of drug, drug-receptor interaction, quantitative structure activity relationship, drug design, molecular modeling, pharmacokinetics, drug metabolism, prodrug, and, new drug development process.

The course provides an overview of the last 200,000 years of human history with a focus on diet and health and deals with different aspects of the relationship between mankind and the environment. The concept of transition is discussed with reference to osteological, archaeological, and historical source material on the Neolithic revolution, urbanization, and industrialization. To understand the population growth from a few individuals to 7 billion people in less than 200,000 years, the course employs an interdisciplinary perspective interweaving biological, social, and economic developments and climate change.

This course returns to the formative texts of Michel Foucault on the topic of biopolitics, a concept that provides key insights into our contemporary political moment. It examines the major debates that have followed in political theory in the study of bio-power and biopolitics as terms integral to the fields of public health and virology (contagion, transmission, immunity, incubation, resilience, quarantine) now stand at the center of political discourse, framing conversations around policing, political economy, sovereignty, and democratic society. The course examines conceptual and historical questions of how life came to be understood as the object of government and how this has intensified the operations of power in the modern era. It also expands understanding of the concept by engaging with the array of topics in which biopolitics has made transformative interventions, from understanding the politics of DNA sequencing and stem cell research to analyzing the transformations of labor and global warfare. It considers how Foucault’s formulation has had wide-ranging effects on political theory, changing the way we understand the body, racism, colonialism, neoliberalism, war and violence, and the category of the human.

This course examines language, discourse, and communication across different contexts within medicine, illness, and health. It explores some of the dominant policy and media discourses of health, focusing on issues such as mental health, relationships of power between patients and health professionals, the framing of personal risk and responsibility in health promotion, and the representations of emerging diseases. Students examine the discursive negotiation of personal experiences of health problems, for example through narrative reconstructions of illness experiences, positioning of "sick" and "healthy" people, doctor-patient interactions, and the use of online forums for advice and support. The course covers a range of approaches and methods that are used in health discourse analysis, such as illness narratives, discursive psychology, conversation analysis, discourse metaphors, and critical discourse analysis.

The course covers the basic principles of epidemiology, examining the determinants of major public health problems including infectious diseases, injuries, environmental health, and emerging threats. Students are trained to develop applied epidemiology competencies in field investigation and public health surveillance by using study designs where they apply their knowledge and skills to solve real life public health problems. Students also address the principles of bias and confounding, thereby enabling them to familiarize themselves with all key epidemiological concepts. This course covers identification of major landmarks in the history of the discipline; calculation and interpretation measures of disease frequency such as prevalence and incidence, mortality, morbidity and their inter-relationship; identification of the major types of study designs within observational (e.g. ecological, cross-sectional, cohort, case-control) and experimental (e.g. randomized controlled trials, cross-over trials) epidemiological studies, and compares their strengths and limitations; calculation and interpretation of various measures of association such as relative risk (risk ratio, rate ratio, odds ratio), attributable risk (risk difference, rate difference), attributable risk percent and population attributable risk 6; and the major sources of bias in epidemiological studies and their potential effects on measures of association. Other course topics include the concepts of confounding, effect modification and mediation, distinguishing association from causation, critically appraising published individual epidemiological studies using a logical framework to ascertain their internal and external validity, the inter-relationships between host, agent, and environment in infectious disease epidemiology, the epidemiologic rationale and relative health benefits of the main strategies for prevention (‘high-risk’ vs. ‘mass’) and the requirements that a screening program must fulfil before it can be considered for possible public health application. The course looks at the future directions and current challenges in epidemiology.

The course introduces the relationship between nutrition and health, and the content includes the following: role of six major nutrients such as protein, fat, carbohydrate, fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E) and water-soluble vitamins (B, C), and minerals; the physiological role of protein and its complementary effects; fat and obesity led by excess energy; carbohydrate and energy metabolism and its influencing factors; the role of dietary fiber; how to timely supplement vitamins from food; how to prevent the lack of fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E) and water soluble vitamins (B, C); the relationship between the role of macronutrients and health; the significance of trace elements (iron, zinc, iodine, selenium) and the health hazards caused by their deficiency.