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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

This course serves as an introduction to sound design and explores the many ways that sound can be utilized to tell a story. Students will gain familiarity with the principles of sound design and common terminology used to describe sound. In this course we will practice relating audio to image and text. Throughout the course we will explore the role of sound design in the theater and break down the process a sound designer uses to get a design from the page to the stage.

This course explores the history, theory and current practice of video design in performance, film and fine art. We will explore projection as a time based, ephemeral medium and interrogate how the unique properties of video can aid in storytelling, particularly in conjunction with three-dimensional space. Students will gain proficiency in various video creation tools and will produce their own video project by the end of the semester.

Connectomics is an emerging neuroscience subfield that aims to make detailed synaptic connectivity maps of the entire brain. This course will provide a comprehensive overview of this growing field, and allow students to actively engage with actual volumetric connectomic datasets. Students will be guided through active learning exercises that explore these datasets using cutting edge software and tools. We will engage with brain volumes from several species, and we will highlight the similarities and differences between synaptic connectivity across organisms.