Health Sciences

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.

In this course, students are expected to be familiar with ideas and concepts covered in the Adaptability and Wellbeing course units at first and second year levels at the University of Manchester. Topics to be covered include the role of illness and treatment beliefs in health care encounters, how medically unexplained conditions can be explained and managed, ways of improving how health care professionals and patients interact, and risk and decision making. Cutting across these topic areas are the themes of theoretical underpinnings, measurement, and application.

This course provides research training for exchange students. Students work on a research project under the guidance of assigned faculty members. Through a full-time commitment, students improve their research skills by participating in the different phases of research, including development of research plans, proposals, data analysis, and presentation of research results. A pass/no pass grade is assigned based a progress report, self-evaluation, midterm report, presentation, and final report.

Population health and the health care system of a nation are increasingly affected by the processes of globalization. This introductory course provides an overview of the emerging field of global health. Lectures and discussions introduce the principles and goals of global health; measurement tools for global health research, and the contemporary development of global health. Invited speakers address global health theories and practices on a range of topics, such as health care delivery systems, control of communicable and non-communicable diseases, occupational health, environmental health, and the rising influences of global trade policies on health and health inequalities. This course is designed for undergraduate students majoring in global health and students in other departments who may or may not have previous exposure to public health sciences.

The brain can be better understood via the neuroimaging modalities, and its applications to medical engineering can also be enabled by neuroimaging modalities. Thus, this course is intends to provide an overview of neuroimaging systems such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); electroencephalography (EEG), and magnetoencephalography (MEG) systems and their analytical methods. 

Innovative drug research has a drug discovery and a drug development phase. In the drug discovery phase, medicinal chemists make molecules and pharmacologists test these molecules. This course challenges students to think of a medical need, to find a target, to come up with a lead, and optimize this lead towards a drug candidate. While performing this structure-based drug design project, students learn about medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, and some computational chemistry. Concepts of organic chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, and medicinal chemistry that form the foundation of structure-based drug design are taught in a just-in-time fashion.

This course provides an in-depth introduction to the major conceptual frameworks of social determinants of health as well as empirical research examining social factors that influence individuals’ health and illness. It also considers how social scientists, epidemiologists, public health experts, and doctors address the social causes of health, illness, death, longevity and health care; and how they use theory to understand them and make causal inferences based on observational or experimental data.