Health Sciences

Public health nutrition is a multidisciplinary area of expertise. To solve global problems in nutrition and health, physiological, and biomedical aspects as well as the social and behavioral context are important to take into consideration. This course focuses on understanding the main function and determinants of diet and its relationship with major global public health challenges (eg. infectious diseases, cancer, and cardiovascular disease). Also, the course focuses on translating evidence from epidemiological research to public health policies and health promotion programs, both at the local, national, and international level. The course addresses common study designs and methods to evaluate the role of nutrition in public health as well as intervention programs addressing nutrition (e.g., behavior, food choice) and/or its societal context (eg. food policies, legislation of food fortification, and food supply at work and schools). A background in biology or chemistry is recommended as a course prerequisite.

This course is an introduction to the history of epidemics from the Neolithic period to neoliberal twenty-first century. It adopts an original angle: the perspective of planetary health, a recently emerged framework that proposes to address the interplay between health and disease, local environments, and the planetary crisis. The course engages simultaneously with the history of medicine (including the legacies of Hippocratic and medieval theories of epidemics), with global history (trade, war, colonialism, international governance), and with environmental history (emergence of pathogens, ecological transformation, multi-species histories, Anthropocene studies). Exploring examples including cholera, plague, Covid-19, and HIV-AIDS, it explores how epidemics are embedded within wider pathogenic ecologies shaped by political structures, planetary change, and human (in)action and ignorance. To do so, it follows a “place-based” approached, which avoids the repetitive and sometimes stereotypical genre of epidemic narratives. Focus is also placed on greater Paris as a region marked by the experience of epidemics and epidemic control.

This course familiarizes students with fundamental issues in the area of self-regulation, motivation, and emotion. Topics include basic self-regulatory processes such as goal setting and goal striving, self-control, and self-knowledge and facilitating and disruptive factors that influence self-regulatory processes, such as motivation, emotion (regulation), habits, and automatic influences. Strategies for improving self-regulation are also discussed. These topics are focused on four specific themes of interest: health, education, finance, and sustainability. The course consists of lectures and tutorials with assignments.

This course provides an overview of the concepts and methods used to quantify the burden of disease at the national and global level. The Global Burden of Disease is a main focus of this course, but other alternative approaches are also discussed. The course consists of lectures, computer labs, a hands-on group-based project, and a field visit to the Department of Statistics of Ministry of Health and Welfare.

This course offers a study of social inequalities and their impacts on public health.

Introduction to the fundamentals of food science and scientific principles underlying food preparation/processing associated with providing a safe, nutritious, and wholesome food to human consumption. Goal is to understand the basic principles and concepts involved in the preparation, processing, and storage of food and food products; to be able to use food science literature and information resources and to apply the working knowledge to the preparation, processing, and storage of foods. 

Prerequisite: General Chemistry or Science of Food Preparation