This course will provide an understanding of the Earth's climate system and how and why this has changed through time. The emphasis will be placed on spatial and temporal scales in the modern system while exploring the evidence for past change, possible mechanisms to explain these changes and the implications of these changes to past, present and future global climate. Students will learn to reconstruct the history and scales of climate change through the use of proxies; understand the mechanisms that act to drive climate change; show and understanding of the long-term natural climate variability on a global and regional scale; understand the importance of natural environmental change, against which to assess human impacts, recent climate change and issues of future environmental change.

This is a class about the live(s) and afterlives of information from 1850 to the present. Not only can information be reproduced (in a variety of material conditions); it can be repurposed and funneled through a variety of different applications, some of them serving radically different purposes than the first purpose of gathering it. Thoreau's journals of plant flowering, for instance, have become important indicators of climate change. More controversial is the sale of biomedical information by personal genomics services for drug discovery, or the construction of forensic databases consisting of the DNA of suspects arrested as a result of racial profiling. We will study the ways in which data has become a way for us to understand and define change, stability, place, and time, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a period of accelerated and increasingly systematic gathering of data,particularly medical, forensic, and environmental data. The class will proceed both chronologically and thematically in three units, from the gathering and use of biomedical data as a way to make patient populations "legible" (to borrow from James Scott), to data as a way to make the environment understandable, and finally to data as a tool for producing and reproducing social relations. As a final project, students will trace a particular data set from its original gathering to its latest usage. Students will also have an opportunity to create their own course content in the final three weeks

An advanced undergraduate course or graduate level course on the fundamental physical principles underlying the operation of traditional semiconducting electronic and optoelectronic devices and extends these concepts to novel nanoscale electronic and optoelectronic devices. The course assumes an undergraduate level understanding of semiconductors physics, as found in ESE 218 or PHYS 240. The course builds on the physics of solid state semiconductor devices to develop the operation and application of semiconductors and their devices in energy conversion devices such as solar photovoltaics, thermophotovoltaics, and thermoelectrics, to supply energy. The course also considers the importance of the design of modern semiconductor transistor technology to operate at low-power in CMOS.

Environmental Justice (EJ) mapping examines the intersection of environmental burdens and the vulnerable communities disproportionately impacted by their harm. From redlining to the static maps that first showed the correlation between race and waste, and moving through to today's truly dynamic EJ mapping tools, The Principles of Mapping for Environmental Justice explores how mapping quite literally put EJ on the environmental movement landscape. This is not a GIS course, nor a course on EJ generally, but an examination into the core components that are inherent to EJ mapping principles. Come explore the indicators and methodologies used by federal, state and local governments and the policy they influence, such as President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative.

This course will provide an overview of the cross-disciplinary fields of civil engineering, environmental sciences, urban hydrology, landscape architecture, green building, public outreach and politics. Students will be expected to conduct field investigations, review scientific data and create indicator reports, working with stakeholders and presenting the results at an annual symposium. There is no metaphor like water itself to describe the cumulative effects of our practices, with every upstream action having an impact downstream. In our urban environment, too often we find degraded streams filled with trash, silt, weeds and dilapidated structures. The water may look clean, but is it? We blame others, but the condition of the creeks is directly related to how we manage our water resources and our land. In cities, these resources are often our homes, our streets and our communities. This course will define the current issues of the urban ecosystem and how we move toward managing this system in a sustainable manner. We will gain an understanding of the dynamic, reciprocal relationship between practices in an watershed and its waterfront. Topics discussed include: drinking water quality and protection, green infrastructure, urban impacts of climate change, watershed monitoring, public education, creating strategies and more.

In the first decades of the sixteenth century, a new art form emerged in Northern Europe: the independent landscape. While perspectival views of rural settings had provided backgrounds to the religious scenes of Jan van Eyck and portraits of Hans Memling, by the 1500s artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer were making paintings, drawings and prints with no iconography other than the observed natural world. Tracing this theme through the Dutch paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jacob van Ruisdael, we will investigate works of art as political assertions made during a time when the excavation of antique ruins inspired the forging of local histories and mythologies. Simultaneously, Europeans navigated to different continents equipped with invented claims that the “natural state” of Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas legally legitimated colonization, development, enslavement, and the plundering of natural resources. Understanding how an idea of nature was instrumentalized to underwrite conceptions of occupation, appropriation, and “just war” will help us to read seemingly autonomous, “secular” artworks as rooted—and participating—in the construction of juridical, philosophical, and etiological ideologies.

Can theatre save the world? In the face of the climate crisis, this question feels especially urgent. This course will consider the relationship of theatre to the environment and climate change, looking at how we got to this point, and where we might go from here. We will consider how ideas about the environment have been spread through classic texts such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. We’ll compare how non-western performances offer different relationships with the environment. And we’ll analyze how performance has responded to climate anxiety; through visions of dystopia and an end of the world, as in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play; through arts activism; and through experimental performance like environmental and immersive theatre. This course is for anyone who is concerned about climate change and interested in how the arts could respond. Most sessions will function as seminar, with short lectures and in-depth discussion about artistic and theoretical texts. We will also workshop different ideas on their feet. The aim is for students to become comfortable enough with this artistic and theoretical mode that they can critique performances across genres from this perspective, articulate their own relationship to it, and see how it might inform their own work.

Thermodynamics studies the fundamental concepts related to energy conversion in such mechanical systems as internal and external combustion engines (including automobile and aircraft engines), compressors, pumps, refrigerators, and turbines. This course is intended for students in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, materials science, physics and other fields. The topics include properties of pure substances, firs-law analysis of closed systems and control volumes, reversibility and irreversibility, entropy, second-law analysis, exergy, power and refrigeration cycles, and their engineering applications.

Students will understand, evaluate, and apply different equations of state relating pressure, temperature, and volume for both ideal and non-ideal systems. The course will focus on calculating and applying residual properties and departure functions for thermodynamic analysis of non-ideal gases. Students will apply and describe simple models of vapor-liquid equilibrium in multi-component systems (e.g. Raoult's Law, modified Raoult's Law, Henry's Law). Additionally, the class will analyze and describe properties of non-ideal mixtures and their component species. We will also model and predict reaction equilibria (including non-ideal fluid systems), as well as solve problems related to complex phase equilibria of multi-component systems (find equilibrium compositions for non-ideal phases).

To introduce students to advanced classical equilibrium thermodynamics based on Callen's postulatory approach, to exergy (Second-Law) analysis, and to fundamentals of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Applications to be treated include the thermodynamic foundations of energy processes and systems including advanced power generation and aerospace propulsion cycles, batteries and fuel cells, combustion, diffusion, transport in membranes, materials properties and elasticity, superconductivity, biological processes. Undergraduate thermodynamics.

**This class will meet in Van Pelt 247, the Glossberg Seminar Room starting on Friday, January 24th.** **Undergraduates may request permission** This course highlights the agencies that have shaped and are shaped by Amazonia. Threatened by deforestation, erosion, fire, and drought, the Amazon rainforest, which spans nine countries, is home to more than thirty million people. It is the ancestral homeland of more than one million indigenous peoples and supports the greatest concentration of biodiversity on Earth. The course seeks to promote interdisciplinarity by considering different approaches to the relationship between nature and culture for contemporary definitions of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, biodesign, and the notion of the built environment itself, guided by the socio-ecological and agricultural practices, thought and activism that discussions of the Amazon Rainforest can foster. Indigenous peoples, along with the archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists, planners, and designers who work critically with them, emphasize that the Amazon is a cultural landscape that has been manipulated, gardened, designed, and even urbanized for centuries. “Forest Histories” refers to the collection of case studies that the class examines through primary and secondary sources, drawing on different disciplinary perspectives, colonial and postcolonial narratives that connect the local and the global, the past and the present. Combining methods from architectural and landscape history and theory with plant studies, archaeology, ethnobotany, industrial history, and postcolonial studies, the course focuses on the lessons that the study of the Amazon can teach us about the enhancement of ecological diversity through human and more-than-human construction and vernacular environments, including the phenomenon of the flying river and the construction of soil (the terra preta), as well as lessons in cosmology, mythology, and coexistence. Focusing on global and local histories of architecture and the built environment, urbanization, infrastructure, land “development” and resource extraction (gold, rubber, manganese, iron ore, and timber), the course examines projects at scales that relate the largest tropical rainforest on the planet to other geographies and territories, particularly Pennsylvania and the so-called Rust Belt, formerly the Steel Belt.

**Juniors and seniors with a background in ecology and environmental science can submit a permit to be considered for registration.** This master's level course in Ecology, titled "Topics in Ecology, Reclamation of Large-Scale Sites," provides an in-depth exploration of key concepts in ecology, practical applications, remediation of Brownfields, and carbon capture techniques. The course aims to equip students with a comprehensive understanding of ecological principles and their real-world applications. Through a combination of lectures, discussions, case studies, and hands-on projects, students will develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and research skills relevant to the field of ecology. The course will also delve into the ecological implications of human activities and explore innovative strategies to mitigate environmental challenges.

This seminar will explore a collection of ideas influencing energy policy development in the U.S. and around the world. Our platform for this exploration will be seven recent books to be discussed during the semester. These books each contribute important insights to seven ideas that influence energy policy: Narrative, Transition, Measurement, Systems, Subsidiarity, Disruption, Attachment. Books for 2018 will be chosen over the summer; the 2017 books are listed here as examples: Policy Paradox (2011) by Stone, Climate Shock (2015) by Wagner and Weitzman, Power Density (2015) by Smil, Connectography (2016) by Khanna, Climate of Hope (2017) by Bloomberg and Pope, Utility of the Future (2016) by MIT Energy Initiative, Retreat from a Rising Sea (2016) by Pilkey, Pilkey-Jarvis, Pilkey.

In-depth exploration of topical issues in environmental studies. Topics and instructors will vary with course offerings.

With the world’s population exploding – 2050 will see the addition of some 2 billion inhabitants, primarily in cities in low and middle income countries – decision-makers are pressed to meet basic infrastructural needs (transportation, water and sanitation, public space, electricity, social service facilities and others) while responding to such large global issues as climate change. Further, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed additional weaknesses in national and subnational infrastructure. No global estimate of urban infrastructure needs exists. However, the G-20’s infrastructure hub illustrates the gaps by country and region. Examples of the current and needed investment by 2040 reveal significant gaps: Brazil $1.2 trillion, $India 526 billion, Nigeria $221 billion. This course will review the history, theory, and current practice of financing with special attention to urban places. It will examine the challenges of the planning and financing projects, explore innovation and best practices in the field and suggest needed regulatory and governance reforms, as well as new and disruptive financial tools for cities. Student research undertaken in the course will contribute to the “Cities Climate-Resilient Infrastructure Financing Initiative (C2IFI)” under the direction of Penn IUR and in collaboration with Perry World House and the Kleinman Center. C2IFI is an important project being incubated at the University of Pennsylvania in partnership with the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance (https://www.citiesclimatefinance.org/), the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and others.

Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, medical practitioners, and engineers, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, social scientists, and legal fields. This course is inspired by the need to attend to environmental challenges, and their health, justice, and knowledge production implications, as inherently social concerns. The class is co-taught by faculty from the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine, and will address the challenges and possibilities of working across disciplinary boundaries, building collaborative affinities, and negotiating frictions between diverse methodologies and epistemological approaches. Dr. Kristina Lyons from the Department of Anthropology brings years of experience collaborating with scientists, small farmers, indigenous communities, lawyers, and judges in Colombia and Chile on watershed restoration projects, soil degradation, toxicity, and the implementation of socio-ecological justice. Dr. Marilyn Howarth is a medical doctor from the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology of the School of Medicine and has experience engaging the public, legislators and regulators around environmental health issues affecting the quality of air, water, soil and consumer products. Through their different lenses, they will foster interdisciplinary environmental collaboration and scholarship by engaging students in discussions and research that bring together the arts and sciences regarding issues of urban air pollution, soil remediation, deforestation, and water contamination, among other environmental health problems. This class offers a unique opportunity for students from engineering, natural and social sciences, humanities, and the arts to learn to converse and collaborate around pr

The course provides a unified introduction to momentum, energy (heat), and mass transport processes. The basic mechanisms and the constitutive laws for the various transport processes will be delineated, and the conservation equations will be derived and applied to internal and external flows featuring a few examples from mechanical, chemical, and biological systems. Reactive flows will also be considered.

This course introduces students to the development and uses of the 4-step urban transportation model (trip generation-trip distribution-mode choice-traffic assignment) for community and metropolitan mobility planning. Using the VISUM transportation desktop planning package, students will learn how to build and test their own models, apply them to real projects, and critique the results. Prerequisite: CPLN 505 or other planning statistics course.

The course will compreshensively cover both theoretical and practical tribology, the science and technology of interacting surfaces in relative motion. The various modes of lubrication, hydrodynamic, elastohydrodynamic, hydrostatic, mixed, solid and dry, will be studied in detail. The contact between solid surfaces will be covered, leading to an understanding of friction and various modes of wear. At each stage, it will be shown how the tribological principles learned can be applied in practice to improve the efficiency and durability of mechanical equipment and thereby enhance sustainability through energy and materials conservation

An opportunity for the student to work closely with a professor in a project to develop skills and technique in research and development. To register for this course, the student writes a one-page proposal that is approved by the professor supervising the research and submitted to the undergraduate curriculum chairman during the first week of the term.