International Climate Change

This course will explore the physical science of the Earth's environment and human interactions with it. Coverage will include the Earth's various environmental systems, various environmental problems, and the direct and indirect causes of these environmental problems. Freshman seminar will mirror the ENVS 1000 recitation, and have additional discussions and social media projects.

This course provides an advanced introduction to the design and delivery of energy policy at various levels of government in the U.S. and beyond. Energy presents theoretical and practical challenges across many disciplines and professions, especially in the context of economic development and environmental sustainability at scales ranging from local to global. This course is intended to provide a broad overview of the institutions, legal frameworks, technologies, and markets involved in energy policy by exploring theories and case studies across these topics, with an emphasis on the energy transition necessitated by climate change. That said, a full introduction to energy policy requires multiple courses and Penn offers many salient ones across several schools including Law, Wharton, Weitzman, SAS, and SEAS. The primary goal of this course is to teach students how to think—rather than what to know—about energy policy. As such, this course provides both (a) a foundation for students who want to take additional courses on energy law, markets, technology, or policy and (b) a synthesis for students who have taken such courses and want to connect ideas and issues across disciplines and professions. Our seminar sessions will be largely discussion and exercise based to allow students to develop skills as energy policy analysts and to collectively theorize connections between laws, institutions, policy design, and outcomes.

The course is an introduction to the most important concepts in materials science and engineering. You will learn how the control of chemical bonding, synthesis, processing, structure and defects can be used to tailor the properties and performance of materials for applications that range from sustainable sources of energy, to construction, to consumer electronics. Case studies are also included to highlight environmental issues associated with materials degradation. This course includes lab demonstrations of key materials properties and a final project where students research an area of materials technology of their own interest.

This class is a survey of methods, concepts, and technologies used by planners to model urban and environmental systems in order to support decision-making and design. The student will learn how to use spatial data and computational models to analyze patterns, identify trends, and visualize alternate futures. The course includes three modules. Module one deals with urban-natural interfaces and includes site suitability analysis; landscape fragmentation analysis, hydrological modeling, and spatial interpolation. Module two introduces agent-based simulation of urban and environmental systems. The final module focuses on land-use applications including handling of remotely sensed data, and urban growth modeling. Students will learn basics of geo-spatial machine learning using the statistical software language R. No experience with R is required, however, basic familiarity with ArcGIS is required.

This course thinks with and from Latin America to consider the environmental and ecological conflicts and politics of cuidado (care) emerging across the hemisphere in times of climate crisis and deepening socio-environmental injustice. Latin American thinkers and practitioners have provided innovative conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing, organizing, and acting in defense of territory and life. In this course, we will consider how legacies of colonialism and (neo)extractivism are not only an ongoing curse of the Americas, but also a a condition of possibility for feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and ecological proposals, such as degrowth, buen vivir, cuerpo-territorio (body-territory), rights of nature, ontological politics, and participatory action research, among other ways of knowing, being, and doing. What can we learn from engagement with the historic and contemporary socioenvironmental challenges occurring across the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Americas? How are diverse urban and rural communities, technoscientific actors, researchers, and ancestral knowers understanding and responding to the region’s emerging climate and environmental scenarios? What are the possibilities for dialogue, exchange, and problem solving between such diverse actors and their multiple ways of knowing and being that span millennial, colonial, and modernizing temporalities? Throughout the course, we will interrogate and reflect on these questions from the situated perspectives of Latin America and its many territorial realities, ecological relations, and social worlds.

This course introduces the principles of material and energy balances and their applications to the analysis of single- and multiple-phase processes used in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and environmental industries. The course focuses on the conceptual understanding of properties of pure fluids, equations of state, and heat effects accompanying phase changes and chemical reactions, and problem-solving skills needed to solve a wide range of realistic, process-related problems.

This course will cover the fundamental materials science issues central to the design of sustainable energy technology. The goal of this course is to expose students to the emerging advances in materials science and materials chemistry that underpin technologies for energy conversion (fuel cells, thermoelectrics, photovoltaics, wind energy etc..), storage (biofuels, artificial photosynthesis, batteries etc) and distribution (smart grids and hydrogen and methane economy concepts etc..) and to place these in a real world context. This class will emphasize concepts in "green materials and green engineering practices" that are emerging with a global focus on "Sustainable Technology." "Sustainability is defined as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs." Engineering materials and processes at all scales; molecular/nanometer, micro, and the macro-scale are critical to developing the tools society required to meet the growing needs for energy and sustainable materials for the built environment.

This course, for graduate students, encompasses topics in fundamental and applied photochemistry and photophysics from the fields of organic chemistry and chemical biology. Key topics and concepts will include basic photophysics, interactions of light with matter, UV-Vis absorption and emission spectroscopy, energy transfer, kinetics/dynamics, Jablonski diagrams, electron transfer, organic photochemistry, and applications in organic chemistry and chemical biology. These topics and concepts will be covered in the context of frontier applications including synthetic chemistry organic photochemistry, molecular imaging, and optogenetic tools among others.

Natural disasters play a fundamental role in shaping landscapes and structuring ecosystems. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to both the natural and social science of disasters. This course will explore the geologic processes that cause natural disasters, the ecological and social consequences of disasters, and the role of human behavior in disaster management and mitigation. Through exploring these concepts, this class will provide you with a broad background in the geosciences and the basic tools needed to understand: how earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, and hurricanes occur; the myriad of ways that we can mitigate against their impacts; and the way in which we can "calculate the cost" of these disasters.

Water wars, deforestation, climate change. Amidst many uncertain crises, in this course we will explore the emergent relationship between people and the environment in different parts of the world. How do people access the resources they need to live? How, when and for whom does 'nature' come to matter? Why does it matter? And what analytical tools we might use to think, mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change? Drawing together classical anthropological texts and some of the emergent debates in the field of climate studies and environmental justice, in this class we focus on the social-ecological processes through which different groups of humans imagine, produce and inhabit anthropogenic environments.

This course covers the fundamentals of atmosphere and ocean dynamics, and aims to put these in the context of climate change in the 21st century. Large-scale atmospheric and oceanic circulation, the global energy balance, and the global energy balance, and the global hydrological cycle. We will introduce concepts of fluid dynamics and we will apply these to the vertical and horizontal motions in the atmosphere and ocean. Concepts covered include: hydrostatic law, buoyancy and convection, basic equations of fluid motions, Hadley and Ferrel cells in the atmosphere, thermohaline circulation, Sverdrup ocean flow, modes of climate variability (El-Nino, North Atlantic Oscillation, Southern Annular Mode). The course will incorporate student led discussions based on readings of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and recent literature on climate change. Aimed at undergraduate or graduate students who have no prior knowledge of meteorology or oceanography or training in fluid mechanics. Previous background in calculus and/or introductory physics is helpful. This is a general course which spans many subdisciplines (fluid mechanics, atmospheric science, oceanography, hydrology).

The oceans cover over 2/3 of the Earth's surface, but what do we know about them and how do they impact our climate and everyday life? We will examine climate change’s impacts on the oceans and how this in turn affects our daily lives from eating seafood to our weather patterns, to movement of goods across vast distances. Through frequent individual assignments using real-time data, readings, video lectures, and asynchronous discussions, students are exposed to the major areas of oceanography including plate tectonics, marine sediments, physical and chemical properties of seawater, ocean circulation, air-sea interactions, waves, tides, nutrient cycles in the ocean, and biology of the oceans through the lens of climate change and the consequent impacts on your daily life. The required text for this course is Essentials of Oceanography, 13th edition, by Alan P. Trujillo and Harold B. Thurman, which is available from a variety of online book retailers.

The oceans cover over 2/3 of the Earth's surface, but what do we know about them and how do they impact our climate and everyday life? We will examine climate change’s impacts on the oceans and how this in turn affects our daily lives from eating seafood to our weather patterns, to movement of goods across vast distances. Through frequent individual assignments using real-time data, readings, video lectures, and asynchronous discussions, students are exposed to the major areas of oceanography including plate tectonics, marine sediments, physical and chemical properties of seawater, ocean circulation, air-sea interactions, waves, tides, nutrient cycles in the ocean, and biology of the oceans through the lens of climate change and the consequent impacts on your daily life. The required text for this course is Essentials of Oceanography, 13th edition, by Alan P. Trujillo and Harold B. Thurman, which is available from a variety of online book retailers.

This course is focused on molecular species that contain metal-carbon bonds, and the role of these compounds in catalytic processes and organic synthesis. Aspects of the synthesis, structure and reactivity of important classes of organometallic compounds such as metallo alkyl, aryl, alkene, alkylidene and alkylidyne complexes are surveyed for the d and f block metals. Emphasis is placed on general patterns of reactivity and recurring themes for reaction mechanisms.

The aim of this 10-day summer program is to introduce inquisitive students to the nature, culture, history and languages of the European Alps in Switzerland and Italy. We will be exploring the geology of the Alps and how it influences the development of wildlife, flora, history, religion, culture and of entire regions, how humans have altered the environment, and how humans respond to climate change in Alpine ecosystems. We will learn how to observe nature in a spectacular landscape, visit cultural sites off the beaten track and explore some of the well-known localities, such as Zurich, Valtellina, Bellinzona, and the Engadine.

This course explores the concepts of stress and resilience including the underlying psychophysiologic mechanisms that regulate them and the impacts they have in our current world. Shaped by evolutionary forces, human psychophysiologic, emotional, behavioral, and social performance continuously adapts to intrinsic and extrinsic stressors. The traditional topics are supplemented with current stress-related research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and current climate disasters. These core topics and processes are discussed in the broader context of (mental) health and understanding of the etiology of stress-related psychopathologies, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Contemporary findings from research studies conducted in laboratory (e.g., neuroimaging), occupational and extreme (e.g., spaceflight), and clinical (e.g., mental health clinic) environments are discussed in the context of history, systems, and research paradigms used to study the psychobiology of stress. Theoretical concepts and research findings are evaluated relative to their utility in developing prevention and mitigation strategies for stress-related psychopathologies, and translational implementation in clinical treatments. This course may feature expert guest lecturers (occupational health experts, and NASA and Antarctic researchers) and practical application of state-of-the-art experimental methodologies used in psychophysiologic research on stress and resilience.

Fossil fuel powered the making--now the unmaking--of the modern world. As the first fossil fuel state, Pennsylvania led the United States toward an energy-intensive economy, a technological pathway with planetary consequences. The purpose of this seminar is to perform a historical accounting--and an ethical reckoning--of coal, oil, and natural gas. Specifically, students will investigate the histories and legacies of fossil fuel in connection to three entities: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. Under instructor guidance, students will do original research, some of it online, much the rest of it in archives, on and off campus, in and around Philadelphia. Philly-based research may also involve fieldwork. While based in historical sources and methods, this course intersects with business, finance, policy, environmental science, environmental engineering, urban and regional planning, public health, and social justice. Student projects may take multiple forms, individual and collaborative, from traditional papers to data visualizations prepared with assistance from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. Through their research, students will contribute to a multi-year project that will ultimately be made available to the public.

Land preservation is one of the most powerful, yet least understood planning tools for managing growth and protecting the environment. This course provides an introduction to the tools and methods for preserving private lands by government agencies and private non-profit organizations (e.g., land trusts). Topics include purchase and donation of development rights (also known as conservation easements), transfer of development rights, land acquisition, limited development, and the preservation of urban greenways, trails, and parks. Preservation examples analyzed: open space and scenic areas, farmland, forestland, battlefields, and natural areas.

Addressing today's energy and environmental challenges requires efficient energy conversion techniques. This course will discuss the circuits that efficiently convert ac power to dc power, dc power from one voltage level to another, and dc power to ac power. The lecture will discuss the components used in these circuits (e.g., transistors, diodes, capacitors, inductors) in detail to highlight their behavior in a practical implementation. In addition, the class will have lab sessions where students will obtain hands-on experience with power electronic circuits.