The growing field of climate technology requires a multifaceted skill set anchored in a sound understanding of finance and policy. This course is designed for students interested in the climate economy seeking to gain functional proficiency in climate finance and policy. The course will cover four key areas of the climate economy from a finance and policy angle: electrification, carbon management, critical minerals & materials, and breakthrough technologies. The finance portion of the course will deliver a basic understanding of the financial reporting of companies within the given subsector, functionality of the relevant technologies, capital structure of relevant companies, and general business model of relevant companies. The policy portion of the course will deliver a basic understanding of the salient policies and issues facing companies in the aforementioned subsectors as well as sector wide headwinds and tailwinds catalyzed by policy. Throughout the course, students will build a financial model, business plan, and present their end deliverable in a shark tank format at the end of the course with observers drawn from the field to provide networking opportunities.

In this course, we will read some of the best-loved novels of all time, written during the 19th century when the novel as we know it came to be. The 19th century industrial and economic revolutions also make it a time of rapid anthropogenic climate change, which is met with a emergent environmental consciousness. We will therefore read from at least two key perspectives: (1) to see how the novel participates in defining and prioritizing the modern concept of the individual and (2) to explore how the novel grapples with emergent ecological concepts, including contemporaneous climate change and evolving ideas about nature. Said otherwise, we will consider not only how the novel works out the question of “who am I” but also the consequences of the answer for the ecological (or anti-ecological) worldview we inherit. We will also ask whether “I” must be in tension with “we” and with “nature”; as we explore the dominant (anti-) ecological attitudes fostered by the novel-as-usual, we will also experiment with other ways of reading, designed to help us better imagine ourselves as embedded, embodied, ecological beings. This course has no pre-requisites. Required: 2 papers, 1 final paper/project, and once/twice-weekly low stakes online discussion posts. Conspicuous in-class engagement is also required.

Even the most brilliant scientists must be able to communicate clearly to effectively share their enthusiasm for their fields. Relating scientific concepts and quantitative data to colleagues is very different than sharing it with the general public. This course will show students how to refine their communication skills in crafting messages to address different audiences and genres.

From the fall of the Roman Empire to Love Canal to the epidemics of asthma, childhood obesity and lead poisoning in West Philadelphia, the impact of the environment on health has been a continuous challenge to society. The environment can affect people's health more strongly than biological factors, medical care and lifestyle. The water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the neighborhood we live in are all components of the environment that impact our health. Some estimates, based on morbidity and mortality statistics, indicate that the impact of the environment on health is as high as 80%. These impacts are particularly significant in urban areas like West Philadelphia. Over the last 20 years, the field of environmental health has matured and expanded to become one of the most comprehensive and humanly relevant disciplines in science. This course will examine not only the toxicity of physical agents, but also the effects on human health of lifestyle, social and economic factors, and the built environment. Topics include cancer clusters, water borne diseases, radon and lung cancer, lead poisoning, environmental tobacco smoke, respiratory diseases and obesity. Students will research the health impacts of classic industrial pollution case studies in the US. Class discussions will also include risk communication, community outreach and education, access to health care and impact on vulnerable populations. Each student will have the opportunity to focus on Public Health, Environmental Protection, Public Policy, and Environmental Education issues as they discuss approaches to mitigating environmental health risks. This honors seminar will consist of lectures, guest speakers, readings, student presentations, discussions, research, and community service. The students will have two small research assignments including an Environmental and Health Policy Analysis and an Industrial Pollution Case Study Analysis. Both assignments will include class presentations. The major research assignment for the course will be a problem-oriented research paper and presentation on a topic related to community-based environmental health selected by the student. In this paper, the student must also devise practical recommendations for the problem based on their research.

Coastal and riverside cities worldwide are under increasing pressure from sea level rise and other effects of climate change. Resilience and sustainability are paradigmatic concepts for the ways in which cities address the effects associated with global warming: sea level rise, extreme weather, changing climate, and their impacts on water, food, energy, and housing. This course focuses on the cultural side of resilience and sustainability in four signature cities: Rotterdam (with areas 6 meters below sea level), Nijmegen (which has devised a new way to live with a major river), New York City (which was devastated by Hurricane Sandy), and New Orleans (one of the most vulnerable American cities). Of course, other cities (Amsterdam, Arnhem, Boston, The Hague, Houston, Miami, etc.) will also come into play. In deeply uncertain times, cities such as these confront an array of interconnected choices that involve not only infrastructural solutions, but priorities, values, and cultural predispositions. Ideally, the strategies that cities devise are generated through inclusive processes based on the understanding that resilience and sustainability should be grounded in the cultural life of their communities. When this is the case, resilience and sustainability can become unique and motivating narratives about how cities and their residents co-develop the kinds of hard, soft, and social infrastructure the climate emergency requires. With this in mind, we will analyze the cities’ climate action plans and resilience strategies; explore their cultural histories relative to flooding events; and consult with Dutch and American experts in climate adaptation, governance, community development, and design. The highlight of the course will be travel to the Netherlands during spring break for site visits and discussions with experts.

Sustainability is more than science, engineering, policy, and design. Surveying the world, we see that the politics and practice of sustainability play out in different ways depending on cultural factors. Some cultures are more prone to pursue ecological goals than others. Why? Do the environmental history and experience of a nation affect policy? Do nature and the environment play a crucial role in the cultural memory of a nation? Can cultural components be effectively leveraged in order to win approval for a politics of sustainability? And what can we, as residents of a country where climate change and global warming are flashpoints in an enduring culture war, learn from other cultures? This course is designed to equip undergraduate students with the historical and cultural tools necessary to understand the cultural aspects of sustainability in two countries noted for their ecological leadership and cultural innovation, Germany and the Netherlands. This hybrid course combines online instruction with a short-term study abroad experience in Berlin and Rotterdam. During the pre-tip online portion of the course, students will become acquainted with the cultural histories of German and Dutch attitudes toward sustainability and the environment through a combination of recorded lectures by the instructor, reading assignments, viewing assignments (documentary and feature films), threaded discussions, and short written assignments. The goal of the pre-trip instruction are to help students develop tools for analyzing and interpreting cultural difference, construct working models of German and Dutch concepts of sustainability, and formulate hypotheses about the relation between culture and policy in Germany and the Netherlands. The class will spend a total of ten days in Europe: five days in Berlin and five days in the area of Rotterdam. The days will be jam-packed with visits to important sites of sustainable practice; discussion with policy makers, activists, and scientists; and immersion in the cultures of the Netherlands and Germany. Upon our return from Europe, the class will debrief and students will present online projects. There are no prerequisites or language requirements.

This course offers students an opportunity to: 1) expand their knowledge base in health care systems; 2) develop intercultural competency skills and 3) shape a conceptual framework for improving the quality of health care for the individual, the family, the community and society at large. Emphasizes the relational, contextual nature of health care and the inseparability of the notions of the health of individuals and the health of family, society, and culture. Includes field experience. Prerequisite: Permission of instructor Seminar held in Spring, study abroad field experience held intra-session

Our theoretical and computational capabilities have reached a point where we can do predictions of materials on the computer. This course will introduce students to fundamenta l concepts and techniques of atomic scale computational modeling. The material will cover electronic structure theory and chemical kinetics. Several well-chosen applications in energy and chemical transformations including study and prediction of properties of chemical systems (heterogeneous, molecular, and biological catalysts) and physical properties of materials will be considered. This course will have modules that will include hands-on computer lab experience and teach the student how to perform electronic structure calculations of energetics which form the basis for the development of a kinetic model for a particular problem, which will be part of a project at the end of the course. Thermodynamics, Kinetics, Physical Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics. Undergraduates should consult and be given permission by the instructor.

To study the built environment of the Americas is to deal with an inherent contradiction. While our disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that spaces matter; an overwhelming majority of our knowledge comes from another continent. As reminded by Edward Said in the classic “Orientalism” of 1974, European culture developed narratives about all other societies on Earth and as a result established itself as the center of human knowledge. One could easily apply Said’s orientalism to a certain “occidentalism” of the American continent and we shall ask what such narrative entails. According to the Eurocentric narrative, the Americas were a vast continent empty of sophisticated cultures and ready to be conquered by superior knowledge of the self-proclaimed “old world”. This course looks into an array of spatial concepts developed by Americans (understood here of course as anyone who is rooted in the continent, from Chile to Alaska); in order to provide Penn undergraduate students with the intellectual tools to understand such spaces.

Lecture course exploring the basic principles of architectural technology and building construction. The course is focused on building material, methods of on-site and off-site preparation, material assemblies, and the performance of materials. Topics discussed include load bearing masonry structures of small to medium size (typical row house constuction), heavy and light wood frame construction, sustainable construction practices, emerging + engineered materials, and integrated building practices. The course also introduces students to Building Information Modeling (BIM) via the production of construction documents.

The superfund law authorizes the president to respond to releases of hazardous substances into the environment in order to protect public health and the environment. This course will focus on topics related to such responses, including environmental investigation and risk assessment, environmental remediation techniques, and related topics.

Before the year 2000, "environmental management" for a business was typically driven by the need to respond to restrictions imposed by environmental regulation. But, at the dawn of the new millennium, leading businesses began to change their concept of environmental management to look beyond simply meeting governmental dictates. These organizations began to evolve and utilize "environmental strategy" to create new ways of growing their businesses by bringing sustainability to the core of their business strategies. This seismic shift in view was accompanied by a bottom line emphasis that, in some cases, turned sustainability efforts into profit centers. Sustainability increasingly is not hidden within the silo of environmental, health, and safety departments but has become much more seamlessly integrated into the operations of corporate functional disciplines. Today, to effectively work in senior management, an executive needs to be knowledgeable not only about his or her specific business function but also how his or her business will be impacted by governmental regulations, policies, corporate sustainability initiatives, green marketing regulations, industry guidelines or 'best practices', new sustainable technologies, energy planning, environmental performance metrics, and required reporting on the environmental impact of their business unit.

Conservationists were long accused of ignoring the needs of human communities. often been thought of as protecting land from people. Now, the conservation movement is embracing a different viewprotecting land with and for people. As a result innovative programs have been developed that connect people to nature, thereby helping to facilitate land conservation. This interdisciplinary course will integrate concepts in scientific method, study design, ecology, and conservation with a focus on birds in order to foster an understanding of how research can inform management of wildlife populations and communities. Topics will include wildlife management, habitat restoration, geographical information systems (GIS), sustainable agriculture, integrated land-use management, and vegetation analysis. This course will also provide opportunities for field research and application of techniques learned in the classroom.

This course places science studies in conversation with counterforensic and ethnographic methodologies, decolonial and feminist approaches, data and environmental justice, critical race and disability studies, and conflict medicine, among other topics. We will be looking at the ways that the arts, natural and social sciences, and community-oriented research agendas come together, and what tensions and possibilities these emergent alliances, intersectional modes of thinking, and practical collaborations may produce. This class offers a unique opportunity for graduate students from engineering, the medical school, natural and social sciences, humanities, and the arts to learn to converse and collaborate around pressing socio-environmental and public health issues. Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to the environmental and public health dilemmas being faced require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, and their relationships with nonhumans and materialities. Aspirations for justice and the possibilities for evidence making require translation across different practices, temporalities and scales; negotiations with the forces of extractive economic structures; and endurance within racist and colonial legacies as well as situations of everyday militarization and social and armed conflict. Throughout the course we will collectively explore moments of newly shared insight, mutual incomprehension, and partial connection between disparate actors and potentially unlikely allies. The idea is not for us to necessarily give up our disciplinary orientations, but rather to learn how to approach shared matters of concern without canceling out our differences and the generative agonisms they produce.

This course explores the US intellectual property regime’s impact on the production, distribution and consumption of media and art. We will consider intellectual property’s seminal role in the formation of emerging media landscapes including cinema, television, social media, and new streaming platforms. We will also develop an understanding of how the structural commitments of the law — copyright, trademark, and patents — contribute to racial hierarchy, economic inequality, and environmental injustice. Topics include intellectual property’s ability to manage Civil Rights discourse on film, television, and the web; examining how copyright has historically deprived Black artists of control over their works; the role of the “author” in the age of artificial intelligence; and the racial disparities of intellectual property on global ecological crises. By the end of the class, students will come away with historical, theoretical, and practical understandings of how media technology changes the law and how the law has subsequently responded to changes in media technology. This course is affiliated with CWIC (Communication Within the Curriculum).

When we think of environmental policies in the USA, we may think of one or more laws geared to improve our nation's air, water, ecosystems, and biodiversity. However, environmental policies and policy-making comprise more than just specific laws and regulations. Making and implementing environmental policy is a process influenced by multiple political, cultural, and economic factors in addition to scientific factors, all of which impact the ability of policies to be effective, that is, to actually improve the environment. In this course, we develop a framework to analyze the effectiveness of the social actors, process and outcomes of environmental policy-making. We ask questions such as: How do policy makers define environmental problems and solutions? Who are the social actors involved in the process? How are policies created and negotiated? What underlying assumptions and realities about the roles of government and society shape policy instruments and design? Are science and risk accurate or distorted? How are social and environmental justice intertwined? To answer these complex questions, we contextualize and critically analyze policies to determine how both government and society impact on regulatory approaches. We study the institutions involved and examine social and ecological outcomes of environmental policies. We also discuss contemporary issues and policy situations that arise throughout the course of the semester, and comment on them in a class blog. Finally, students will select an environmental issue and formulate a policy proposal to recommend to decisionmakers.

The course focuses on devices that convert thermal, solar, or chemical energy directly to electricity, i.e., without intermediate mechanical machinery such as a turbine or a reciprocating piston engine. A variety of converters with sizes ranging from macro to nano scale will be discussed, with the advantages offered by nanoscale components specifically highlighted. Topics will include thermoelectric energy converters and radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), thermionic energy converters (TEC), photovoltaic (PV) and thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cells, as well as piezoelectric harvesters. Additional topics may include magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) generators, alkali metal thermal-to-electric converters (AMTEC), and fuel cells.

Settler colonialism in the Americas is both material and ideological, rooted in dispossessions that are traceable to historical conquest, yet marked in the present. To rectify dispossession is to look both backwards and forwards, to repair material losses and to attend to the values and ideologies that hybridize our present. This course delves into case histories of Indigenous, Latinx, Afro-descendant, and other marginalized populations who have been dispossessed of territory, natural resources, freedom, political rights, and cultural heritage. Our primary goals are the following: first, we seek to document specific territorial, embodied, and heritage dispossessions through the mechanisms of deceit, disease, and warfare (both broadly and specifically); second, we aspire to outline and identify models and processes that promote recovery and restorative justice. Faculty from several departments and programs (anthropology, history, Latin American studies, Native American studies, gender studies, etc.) will present guest lectures highlighting their critical studies of archaeological, museological, artistic, and other processes of dispossession and recovery. Their case studies include: counter-mapping techniques for identifying Indigenous lands; mapping the movements of bodies and objects among museums; tracking trends in heritage loss and recovery; etc. Students will learn about useful resources and initiatives for decolonizing, and will gain experience in understanding dispossessions of the past, while applying restorative methodologies in the present.

Creating meaningful solutions to the biggest challenges facing humanity today requires diverse interventions at all scales: macro, micro, and everything in between. The projects reshaping business as usual and driving more sustainable outcomes involve both multinational cooperation at the highest levels and place-specific interventions at the scale of individuals, families, and communities. This course will explore innovative, cross-scale initiatives through which Central America’s largest and fastest growing economy is tackling sustainability challenges while balancing cultural values and conservation of biodiversity with economic growth and exploitation of natural resources. On the international stage, the Republic of Panama leads the way on environmental conservation, even surpassing ambitious global targets by protecting more than 50 percent of its oceans and becoming one of the first certified carbon-negative countries. The globalization-defining Panama Canal epitomizes human efforts to make something happen that was colossal in scale and macro in scope. Today’s Panama also offers opportunities to study bright spots, positive deviance, and the emergence of new economic initiatives based on diverse worldviews—despite the micro scale of some of these projects, they too have the potential to change world order. Geographically, politically, culturally, and economically, Panama is an excellent place to prototype. Underdeveloped relative to its potential, the nation provides a fruitful environment for Panamanian and expatriate entrepreneurs alike to develop new ventures, organize from the ground up, and intentionally design for sustainable scalability.

At the core of this experiential travel course is the opportunity to visit a range of Panama’s land, sea, and cityscapes and interact with pioneering companies, entrepreneurs, policymakers, NGOs, and scientists. Organizational Dynamics students will be challenged to create and contribute while learning in this dynamic environment. Travel abroad will take place in Panama over Penn’s Spring Break (March 1-10, 2024), with pre-departure and post-trip sessions TBD. Students are expected to complete readings in advance of the trip, keep a field journal, participate in scheduled meetings and activities, complete a paper or applied project synthesizing their learning, and give a presentation on their work during the final session.

This course covers Earth System dynamics from the viewpoint of deep time. Specifically, the course focuses on (i) the history of our planet and its life, (ii) the physical, chemical and biological feedbacks driving evolution and (iii) the evidence that has given us access into the understanding of the Geologic Time Scale.