Queer Graphics

This course will explore LGBTQ+ visibility from Pre-Liberation to the twenty-first Century through examining and responding creatively to queer designs and artworks. Through a series of traditional and digital printmaking projects, students will engage with queer theory/time, LGBTQ+ art history, expanded notions of gender identity and sexual orientation, queer aesthetics, and coding.

Geographies of Education

In this course we will explore geographies of education with particular attention to questions of inequity and racism across educational landscapes. Specific topics will include zoning, school choice, racial segregation and neoliberal school reforms, and will draw on scholarship at the intersection of education and geography (including from the sub-fields of educational geographies and children's geographies). Students will complete substantial research projects and hone their abilities to analyze policies and institutions in spatial terms.

Lab: Comparative Cognition

In this class, we take a deep dive into comparative cognition: the study of cognition across species. We will review the background literature and learn about hypotheses creation, study design, statistics, and write-ups in this field. Students will present on a topic within comparative cognition and take part in group discussions on the content of peer-reviewed papers. Then, students will take on the role of a comparative cognition researcher and design, perform, and write-up a six-week study on the cognition of domesticated species of animal (species to be determined).

Feminists in Power

What happens when feminists enter the halls of power, transforming critiques into law and policy? What occurs when feminists lead in a prosecutor's office or international bodies? This course examines the complexities of feminist governance, focusing on how some feminists shift from opposition to shaping laws, policies, and public opinion. We'll explore the NGO-ization of movements, transnational feminist thought, and debates around incarceration. Topics include sexual violence campaigns, campus rape policy, sex work, and harassment.

Science on Screen

For our entire lives, movies have captured our attention, whether at the theater or on our phones. Filmmaking is a highly technical art, and scientific principles determine what is possible. Filmmakers develop creative solutions within these principles to trick the viewer into believing what they see. Advances in science also advance filmmaking, influencing photography, production design, and so on. Additionally, scientists use these techniques to carry out their research. This course will explore the many intersections of science and filmmaking.

Foundations in Immunology Lab

We are surrounded by microbes, both harmful and beneficial. Your immune system keeps you alive by efficiently distinguishing between helpful and harmful and eliminating harmful foreign invaders. It does this in a remarkably adaptive and tightly controlled way. In this laboratory, we will focus on foundational mechanisms of cellular immunology and immunological laboratory techniques including antibody isolation and purification, SDS-PAGE, Western blotting, enzyme-linked immunoassay (ELISA) disease detection and histology.

Gene Therapy

The first human gene therapy clinical research in the United States took place in 1990. Since then, there have been significant advances in gene therapy development, but there have also been problems, setbacks and even tragedies. Students in this seminar will read, present, discuss, and write about the primary literature covering both the history and the most recent advances in human gene therapy.

Casual Inference for Data Sci

You might have heard the phrase "correlation is not causation" - but then, what is causation? For example, how did scientists determine that smoking causes lung cancer? This course will explore how to ask and answer causal questions using data. We will learn the fundamentals of estimating cause-and-effect relationships, drawing from foundations in computer science, statistics, and economics. We will also use modern data science tools coding in Python to run simulations, work with data, and communicate our findings.

Applied Rigidity Theory

Suppose you were asked to: control a formation of robots to cooperatively carry an object; engineer a bridge using metal beams and bolts; or develop a web app to assist in drug design. The area of "rigidity theory" provides tools for approaching any of these tasks. We start with fundamental results from classical rigidity theory, culminating in a combinatorial characterization of rigid 2D "bar-and-joint frameworks" and a graph-theoretic algorithm. We then shift to specific applications drawn from domains such as robotics, structural engineering and computational biology.

Economic Growth

Once upon a time, the whole world was poor. Why is that no longer true? Since the Solow growth model was developed in the 1950s, we have known that the primary engine for economic growth is technological change. There has been a vast amount of research since the mid-1990s that has expanded our understanding of the mechanisms of economic growth, what creates technological change and how it affects economies. What is the difference between countries that have become rich and those that have not? Is there something countries can do to increase their economic growth?
Subscribe to