The principles of surfaces and colloid chemistry critical to range of technologies indispensable to modern life. Surface and colloid chemistry has significance to life sciences, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, environmental remediation and waste management, earth resources recovery, electronics, advanced materials, enhanced oil recovery, and emerging extraterrestrial mining. Topics include: thermodynamics of surfaces, properties of surfactant solutions and surface films, electrokinetic phenomena at interfaces, principles of adsorption and mass transfer and modern experimental techniques. Leads to deeper understanding of interfacial engineering, particulate dispersions, emulsions, foams, aerosols, polymers in solution, and soft matter topics.
Utilization of data in everyday civil infrastructure. Optimization of decision-making for owners, facility managers, and policy-makers based on predictive results. Provides students with basic understanding of machine learning concepts and methods to formulate civil engineering problems to prediction problems. Introduces students to classic machine learning algorithms, deep learning algorithms, algorithmic thinking, and probabilistic views, and their applications in existing civil engineering problems.
This course deals with the proteome: the expressed protein complement of a cell, organelle, matrix, tissue, organ or organism. The study of the proteome (proteomics) is broadly applicable to life sciences research, and is increasingly important in academic, government and industrial research through extension of the impact of advances in genomics. These techniques are being applied to basic research, exploratory studies of cancer and other diseases, drug discovery and many other topics. Emphasis will be on mastery of practical techniques of sample preparation, liquid chromatography/ mass spectrometry (LC/MS) with electrospray ionization, and Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption and Ionization (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry. Database searching and interpretation for identification of proteins will be intensively studied, and practiced supported by background tutorials and exercises covering other techniques used in proteomics. Open to students in M.A. in Biotechnology Program (points can be counted against laboratory requirement for that program), Ph.D. and advanced undergraduate students with background in genetics or molecular biology. Students should be comfortable with basic biotechnology laboratory techniques as well as being interested in doing computational work in a Windows environment.
This seminar course explores the intersection of human rights and populism, examining how the rise of populist movements, leaders, and ideologies impact democratic institutions, global politics, and the protection of fundamental human rights. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the course evaluates the sociological, economic, and cultural factors driving populist surges, as well as their consequences for civic culture, governance, and international relations. Students will analyze the implications of populism for human rights in the context of migration, authoritarianism, freedom of speech, minorities, and challenges to international and regional courts and institutions. The course will investigate both left-wing and right-wing populist movements, considering the threat they pose to human rights, their pursuit of socio-economic rights through the redistribution of wealth, and how the human rights project could and is being rethought in light of these challenges and opportunities.
Overview of electrochemical processes and applications from perspectives of materials and devices. Thermodynamics and principles of electrochemistry, methods to characterize electrochemical processes, application of electrochemical materials and devices, including batteries, supercapacitors, fuel cells, electrochemical sensor, focus on link between material structure, composition, and properties with electrochemical performance.
Prerequisites: STAT GU4205 or the equivalent. A fast-paced introduction to statistical methods used in quantitative finance. Financial applications and statistical methodologies are intertwined in all lectures. Topics include regression analysis and applications to the Capital Asset Pricing Model and multifactor pricing models, principal components and multivariate analysis, smoothing techniques and estimation of yield curves statistical methods for financial time series, value at risk, term structure models and fixed income research, and estimation and modeling of volatilities. Hands-on experience with financial data.
Prerequisites: STAT GU4204 or the equivalent. STAT GU4205 is recommended. Modeling and inference for random processes, from natural sciences to finance and economics. ARMA, ARCH, GARCH and nonlinear models, parameter estimation, prediction and filtering. This is a core course in the MS program in mathematical finance.
Prerequisites: STAT GU4203. STAT GU4207 is recommended. Basics of continuous-time stochastic processes. Wiener processes. Stochastic integrals. Ito's formula, stochastic calculus. Stochastic exponentials and Girsanov's theorem. Gaussian processes. Stochastic differential equations. Additional topics as time permits.
Prerequisites: PSYC UN1010 PSYC UN1010 or equivalent; background in statistics/research methods recommended How does the human brain make sense of the acoustic world? What aspects of auditory perception do humans share with other animals? How does the brain perform the computations necessary for skills such as soundlocalization? How do we focus our auditory attention on one voice in a crowd? What acoustic cues are important for speech perception? How is music perceived? These are the types of questions we will address by studyingthe basics of auditory perception from textbook readings and reviews, and reading classic and current literatureto understand scientific progress in the field today.
Prerequisites: STAT GU4264. Mathematical theory and probabilistic tools for modeling and analyzing security markets are developed. Pricing options in complete and incomplete markets, equivalent martingale measures, utility maximization, term structure of interest rates. This is a core course in the MS program in mathematical finance.
French literature has been preoccupied with prostitutes and prostitution for centuries. This course proposes to examine the some of the various depictions of women and men who make their living via sexual activity, from the 18th century through our own era. We will trace the different varieties of “loose women”, identifying an extensive taxonomy of
courtisanes
,
lorettes
,
grisettes
,
filles de joie
etc., in male-authored works from
Manon Lescaut
(1731) through the apogee of literary obsession with “fallen women” in the 19th-century. Over the course of the century the romantic “whore with a heart of gold” trope (Dumas’s
Dame aux camélias
) coexisted with Mérimée’s fatal gypsy
Carmen
, Flaubert and Baudelaire’s insistence on prostitution as metaphor, Maupassant’s analyses of bourgeois hypocrisy in this regard, and, finally, Zola’s irresistible and destructive
Nana
. The 20th century saw more nuanced depictions of both female and male prostitution from such authors as Colette and Jean Genet. We will conclude with 21st-century first-person accounts of sex work by Nelly Arcan (
Putain
, 2001) and Virginie Despentes (
King Kong théorie
, 2006).
Why do we put off things until later—even things we know are important; even in cases where we know the cost of delaying; even when doing the work more gradually over time would be less unpleasant; even sometimes on tasks we anticipate enjoying? Everyone procrastinates sometimes, but why do some people seem to procrastinate a lot while others don’t have much of an issue with task delaying? This course reviews current research on selected cognitive and motivational theories of procrastination, as well as interaction of task delay with mental health and neurodiversity. We will close with an examination of some potential interventions that may help people reduce or avoid procrastination, both at the individual level and in academic settings such as course design.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 and STAT UN1201 An introduction to the economics principles underlying the financial decisions of firms. The topics covered include bond and stock valuations, capital budgeting, dividend policy, market efficiency, risk valuation, and risk management. For information regarding REGISTRATION for this course, go to: http://econ.columbia.edu/registration-information.
Few places in the world have witnessed the shift from a multiethnic territory to a nationally homogeneous nation-state as profoundly as the Polish lands. A crucial site of the collapse of Central and Eastern European empires, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansings, Nazi occupation, Soviet-style socialism, and accession to the European Union, Poland’s twentieth-century and contemporary culture has developed in the shadow of catastrophe and political and economic revolutions.
This seminar investigates shifting meanings of cultural difference and sameness from 1918 to the present, including Polish debates on multiculturalism spurred by the ongoing European refugee crisis. We will examine meanings attached to people, things, and landscapes - Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, German, Nazi or Soviet - through the lens of visual arts, everyday objects, scholarly discourses, and urban and rural topographies. While we will pay special attention to the historiography of twentieth-century Eastern Europe, the course relies on interdisciplinary approaches and welcomes students interested in the history of art and architecture, literature, social history, anthropology, cultural studies, and critical museology.
Prerequisites: PSYC UN1001 or equivalent introductory psychology course What is curiosity and how do we study it? How does curiosity facilitate learning? This course will explore the various conceptual and methodological approaches to studying curiosity and curiosity-driven learning, including animal and human studies of brain and behavior.
Prerequisites: (biol un2005 or biol un2401) or BIOL UN2005 or BIOL UN2401 or equivalent This is an advanced microscopy course aimed at graduates and advanced undergraduate students, who are interested in learning about the foundational principles of microscopy approaches and their applications in life sciences. The course will introduce the fundamentals of optics, light-matter interaction and in-depth view of most commonly used advanced microscopy methods, explore important practical imaging parameters, and also introduce digital images and their analysis.
Prerequisites: STAT GU4205 and at least one statistics course numbered between GU4221 and GU4261. This is a course on getting the most out of data. The emphasis will be on hands-on experience, involving case studies with real data and using common statistical packages. The course covers, at a very high level, exploratory data analysis, model formulation, goodness of fit testing, and other standard and non-standard statistical procedures, including linear regression, analysis of variance, nonlinear regression, generalized linear models, survival analysis, time series analysis, and modern regression methods. Students will be expected to propose a data set of their choice for use as case study material.
Topics in Modern Statistics provide students with an opportunity to study a specialized area of statistics in more depth to meet the educational needs of a rapidly changing field.
Topics in Modern Statistics provide students with an opportunity to study a specialized area of statistics in more depth to meet the educational needs of a rapidly changing field.
Topics in Modern Statistics provide students with an opportunity to study a specialized area of statistics in more depth to meet the educational needs of a rapidly changing field.
Topics in Modern Statistics provide students with an opportunity to study a specialized area of statistics in more depth to meet the educational needs of a rapidly changing field.
Programming experience in Python extremely useful. Introduction to fundamental algorithms and analysis of numerical methods commonly used by scientists, mathematicians and engineers. Designed to give a fundamental understanding of the building blocks of scientific computing that will be used in more advanced courses in scientific computing and numerical methods for PDEs (e.g. APMA E4301, E4302). Topics include numerical solutions of algebraic systems, linear least-squares, eigenvalue problems, solution of non-linear systems, optimization, interpolation, numerical integration and differentiation, initial value problems and boundary value problems for systems of ODEs. All programming exercises will be in Python.
Prerequisites: four semesters of biology with a firm foundation in molecular and cellular biology. Introduces students to the current understanding of human diseases, novel therapeutic approaches and drug development process. Selected topics will be covered in order to give students a feeling of the field of biotechnology in health science. This course also aims to strengthen students’ skills in literature comprehension and critical thinking.
This course introduces the fundamental principles of corporate finance and their application to real-world business decisions. Students will examine how companies determine value, measure risk, and make financing choices, while developing the tools to analyze corporate investments and capital structures.
Intellectual Goals and Rationale
The course addresses core questions that drive business decision-making:
How do we determine what a company or investment opportunity is worth?
How do we value financial securities in an uncertain world?
What is risk? How do we measure it, and how does it affect the cost of capital?
What is the appropriate balance between debt and equity?
Course Content and Learning Approach
Through a combination of theoretical frameworks, case discussions, and Excel-based financial modeling, students will build the ability to analyze complex financial scenarios. Lectures provide the foundations of valuation and financing, while case work applies these tools to real business challenges.
Why This Course Matters
Valuation, investment evaluation, and financing decisions are central to careers in finance, consulting, entrepreneurship, and management. The skills gained—financial modeling, risk assessment, and valuation analysis—are directly relevant to roles in investment banking, private equity, corporate development, consulting, and executive leadership.
Who Should Take This Course
This introductory finance course is open to students from all academic backgrounds who seek to strengthen their financial literacy and analytical capabilities. It is particularly valuable for:
Students considering careers in finance, consulting, or general management
Entrepreneurs who need to understand funding and valuation
Students in other fields interested in how businesses create and measure value
Those planning to pursue graduate business education
Prerequisites
Economics:
ECON UN1105 Principles of Economics
Statistics (one of the following):
STAT UN1001 Intro to Statistical Reasoning
STAT UN1101 Introduction to Statistics
STAT UN1201 Calc-Based Introduction to Statistics
PSYC UN1610 Introductory Statistics for Behavioral Science
Cours
Ordinary differential equations including Laplace transforms. Reactor Design. An introduction to process control applied to chemical engineering through lecture and laboratory. Concepts include the dynamic behavior of chemical engineering systems, feedback control, controller tuning, and process stability.
Focusing on a canonical author is an immensely productive way to explore translation research and practice. The works of Sappho, Dante, Rilke, Césaire or Cavafy raise the question of reception in relation to many different critical approaches and illustrate many different strategies of translation and adaptation. The very issue of intertextuality that challenged the validity of author-centered courses after Roland Barthes’s proclamation of the death of the author reinstates it if we are willing to engage the oeuvre as an on-going interpretive project. By examining the poetry of the Greek Diaspora poet C. P. Cavafy in all its permutations (as criticism, translation, adaptation), the Cavafy case becomes an experimental ground for thinking about how a canonical author can open up our theories and practices of translation. For the final project students will choose a work by an author with a considerable body of critical work and translations and, following the example of Cavafy and his translators, come up with their own retranslations. Among the materials considered are commentary by E. M. Forster, C. M. Bowra, and Roman Jakobson, translations by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, James Merrill, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Daniel Mendelsohn, poems by W.H. Auden, Lawrence Durrell, and Joseph Brodsky, and visual art by David Hockney, and Duane Michals.
Introduction to natural and anthropogenic carbon cycle, and carbon - climate. Rationale and need to manage carbon and tools with which to do so (basic science, psychology, economics and policy background, negotiations - society; emphasis on interdisciplinary and inter-dependent approach). Simple carbon emission model to estimate the impacts of a specific intervention with regards to national, per capita and global emissions. Student-led case studies (e.g. reforestation, biofuels, CCS, efficiency, alternative energy) to illustrate necessary systems approach required to tackle global challenges.
This course examines the historical and theoretical issues concerning the representation of African Americans in film and media. The course will provide a historical overview while focusing on key themes, concepts, and texts.
This course seeks to build upon (or expand) skills learned in sculpture I. This workshop based course allows students more access to the shops to continue to develop those introductory skills while focusing on specific materials and processes. In this course students will complete one self directed project and a number of inclass short assignments and exercises providing a greater exposure to sculptural practice and processes. Acting as both a bridge to and support for more advanced inquiry into making.
Definition of a plasma. Plasmas in laboratories and nature, plasma production. Motion of charged particles in electric and magnetic fields, adiabatic invariants. Heuristic treatment of collisions, diffusion, transport, and resistivity. Plasma as a conducting fluid. Electrostatic and magnetostatic equilibria of plasmas. Waves in cold plasmas. Demonstration of laboratory plasma behavior, measurement of plasma properties. Illustrative problems in fusion, space, and nonneutral or beam plasmas.
Prerequisites: completion of three years of modern Chinese at least, or four years of Japanese or Korean.
This course is intended to provide a quantitative introduction to storage of carbon derived from greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, with a focus on geological carbon storage and mineralization in saline aquifers, depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs, and “reactive” subsurface formations (rocks rich in Fe, Ca, and Mg) as well and other natural and engineered storage reservoirs (e.g., terrestrial storage, ocean storage, building materials). Course modules cover fundamental processes such as geochemical fluid-rock interactions and fluid flow, transport, and trapping of supercritical and/or dissolved CO2 in the context of pore-scale properties to field-scale example storage reservoirs and specific integrative problems such as reservoir characterization and modeling techniques, estimating storage capacity, and regulations and monitoring.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 Empirical findings on economic development, theoretical development models; problems of efficient resource allocation in a growing economy; balanced and unbalanced growth in closed and open economic systems; the role of capital accumulation and innovation in economic growth.
This course examines the historical and theoretical issues concerning the representation of African Americans in film and media. The course will provide a historical overview while focusing on key themes, concepts, and texts.
General experimental techniques in materials science, including X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopies, atomic force microscopy, materials synthesis and thermodynamics, characterization of material properties (mechanical, electrochemical, magnetic, electronic). Additional experiments at discretion of instructor.
Introduction to aerospace propulsion, including traditional and emerging aircraft and rocket propulsion systems — and energy storage approaches. Introduction to the design and thermodynamic performance analysis of such systems and their major components.
This course provides students with a rigorous foundation in capital markets and investments, emphasizing asset valuation from an applied perspective. It covers valuation techniques for financial securities essential to portfolio management and risk management applications. Key topics include arbitrage, the term structure of interest rates, portfolio theory, diversification, equilibrium asset pricing models such as the CAPM, market efficiency and inefficiencies, performance evaluation, analysis of common pooled investment vehicles, behavioral finance, and tax aware investment strategies. Through interactive activities, case studies, and simulations utilizing real world market data, students will acquire analytical skills and foundational knowledge required for advanced finance courses and practical roles within the investment industry.
Descriptive statistics, central limit theorem, parameter estimation, sufficient statistics, hypothesis testing, regression, logistic regression, goodness-of-fit tests, applications to operations research models.
What are the traditional definitions of jazz and how do they apply to improvised music in the twenty-first century? This course aims to communicate reliable methods and processes useful when dissecting and evaluating jazz performances and jazz compositions. Students will engage with traditional and fundamental jazz improvisation theory, then extrapolate new modalities reflective of the music happening today; including categorizing music on gradations from minimally to fully improvisational, tonal to harmonically abstract, rhythmically rigid to free, and sonically acoustic to fully synthesized. The class will explore and differentiate between “new complexity” classical compositions and virtuosic free form improvisation, compare US jazz to versions happening in other countries, and to recognize how world music influences affect improvisational tonal systems and improvisational traits.
Applications of continuum mechanics to the understanding of various biological tissues properties. The structure, function, and mechanical properties of various tissues in biolgical systems, such as blood vessels, muscle, skin, brain tissue, bone, tendon, cartilage, ligaments, etc. are examined. The establishment of basic governing mechanical principles and constitutive relations for each tissue. Experimental determination of various tissue properties. Medical and clinical implications of tissue mechanical behavior.
This course examines historical narratives and record-keeping in premodern Korea, focusing on the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910). It explores writing as a medium of power that shaped politics, social order, gender relations, and cultural identity. Through diverse texts, including official chronicles, didactic texts, memoirs, and (auto)biographies, students will analyze how individuals and institutions used writing to assert authority, express dissent, and document their lives.
Advanced instruction in the Armenian dialect. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.
This course deals with a fundamental question of sustainability management: how to change organizations and more complex systems, such as communities, industries, and markets, by integrating sustainability concerns in the way that they operate. The course poses this question to a dozen leading sustainability practitioners, who answer it by discussing management strategies that they use in their own work. Through these guest lectures, extensive class discussion, readings, and writing assignments, students identify and simulate applying practical ways for transforming how organizations and complex systems work. The practitioners, who work in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors and in a wide variety of organizations, make presentations in the first hour of the course. Students then have time to ask questions and speak informally with the guest practitioners, and will participate in an instructor-led class discussion, geared toward identifying management strategies, better understanding their application, and considering their effectiveness. By the end of the course, the students gain an understanding of management tools and strategies that they, themselves, would use to integrate sustainability in organizations.
The course complements the M.S. in Sustainability Management program’s required course, Sustainability Management (SUMA K4100). In that course, students study management and organization theory. In the Practicum, students learn directly from leading practitioners, who confront sustainability management issues daily.
Prerequisites: VIAR UN2300 (Formerly R3302) Laboratory in Relational Art; Sculpture without Objects The purpose of this class will be to explore the function of Relational Aesthetics in contemporary art practice and to develop ideas about the role of context in art, as the students develop their own site-specific works and research historical precedents for art designed to be exhibited in non-traditional venues. This course will also prepare students for professional work preparing art for venues of that type. This class will be structured around studio work, with an emphasis on the development and production of a final site-specific project. In order to foster students’ growth and ongoing investigation into the nature of contemporary sculpture, the class will also be comprised of slide lectures, visits to local artists’ studios, and galleries, as well as various public art projects throughout the city. As the semester progresses, the emphasis will gradually be shifted from research to intensive studio work on a final project, often a proposal for a site-specific work in a non-traditional venue. Generally, the first half of each class session will be dedicated to lecture and discussion, while the second half will be dedicated to individual studio work and critique.
Prerequisites: (CHEM UN2443 and CHEM UN2444) and (CHEM UN3079 and CHEM UN3080) and (BIOC UN3501) , or the equivalent. Development and application of chemical methods for understanding the molecular mechanisms of cellular processes. Review of the biosynthesis, chemical synthesis, and structure and function of proteins and nucleic acids. Application of chemical methods--including structural biology, enzymology, chemical genetics, and the synthesis of modified biological molecules--to the study of cellular processes--including transcription, translation, and signal transduction.
Differential and multistage amplifiers; small-signal analysis; biasing techniques; frequency response; negative feedback; stability criteria; frequency compensation techniques. Analog layout techniques. An extensive design project is an integral part of the course.
This course introduces a molecular level understanding of topics in modern chemical engineering. It builds upon and validates the concepts presented in the rest of the chemical engineering curriculum via a molecular perspective.
Thermodynamics and kinetics of reacting flows; chemical kinetic mechanisms for fuel oxidation and pollutant formation; transport phenomena; conservation equations for reacting flows; laminar nonpremixed flames (including droplet vaporization and burning); laminar premixed flames; flame stabilization, quenching, ignition, extinction, and other limit phenomena; detonations; flame aerodynamics and turbulent flames.
How do families decide who gets educated and who goes to work? Why do some people remain unemployed even when jobs are available? How do institutions, laws, and cultural norms shape who works, where, and for how much - and what are the consequences of these decisions around the world?
ECON GU4321 explores the economic lives of people in low- and middle-income countries, with a focus on family and labor market issues. We'll examine how individuals and families make decisions about work, education, and marriage - and how these choices are shaped by social norms, market failures, and government policies.
The course tackles contemporary development challenges including women's labor force participation, discrimination in hiring and wages, the relationship between marriage markets and human capital investment, and how climate change reshapes employment opportunities. Using both theoretical and empirical tools, we'll analyze the policy implications of these issues.
Design and analysis of high speed logic and memory. Digital CMOS and BiCMOS device modeling. Integrated circuit fabrication and layout. Interconnect and parasitic elements. Static and dynamic techniques. Worst-case design. Heat removal and I/O. Yield and circuit reliability. Logic gates, pass logic, latches, PLAs, ROMs, RAMs, receivers, drivers, repeaters, sense amplifiers.
The platform of every modern “Islamist” political party calls for the implementation of “the shari‘a.” This term is invariably (and incorrectly) interpreted as an unchanging legal code dating back to 7th century Arabia. In reality, Islamic law is an organic and constantly evolving human project aimed at ascertaining God’s will in a given historical and cultural context. This course offers a detailed and nuanced look at the Islamic legal methodology and its evolution over the last 1400 years. The first part of the semester is dedicated to “classical” Islamic jurisprudence, concentrating on the manner in which jurists used the Qur’an, the Sunna (the model of the Prophet), and rationality to articulate a coherent legal system. The second part of the course focuses on those areas of the law that engender passionate debate and controversy in the contemporary world. Specifically, we examine the discourse surrounding Islamic family (medical ethics, marriage, divorce, women’s rights) and criminal (capital punishment, apostasy, suicide/martyrdom) law. The course ends by discussing the legal implications of Muslims living as minorities in non-Islamic countries and the effects of modernity on the foundations of Islamic jurisprudence. This class is designed for students interested in a close examination of the Islamic legal system; it is not a broad introduction to the Islamic religion. The format of the class will vary from topic to topic but students should anticipate *extensive* participation through in-class debates.
This advanced seminar examines important approaches, issues, perspectives, and themes related to planetary concerns of environmental crisis, climate change, life sustainability, and multi-species flourishing, with a focus on feminist, postcolonial, anti-racist, and queer perspectives. Topics for discussion and study include the global pandemic, histories of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism,
Prereqs: BOTH 1 WMST Intro course PLUS any WGSS 'Foundation' course, OR instructor permission.
This course provides a rigorous introduction to the theory underlying widely used biophysical methods, which will be illustrated by practical applications to contemporary biomedical research problems. The course has two equally important goals. The first goal is to explain the fundamental approaches used by physical chemists to understand the behavior of molecules and to develop related analytical tools. The second goal is to prepare students to apply these methods themselves to their own molecular biology research projects. The course will be divided into seven modules: (i) solution thermodynamics with an emphasis on application to analysis of protein structure, folding, and binding interactions; (ii) hydrodynamic methods; (iii) statistical analysis of experimental data; (iv) molecular dynamics calculations; (v) optical spectroscopy with an emphasis on fluorescence; (vi) nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy; and (vii) light-scattering and diffraction methods including an overview of cryogenic electron microscopy reconstruction methods. In each module, the underlying physical theories and models will be presented and used to derive the mathematical equations applied to the analysis of experimental data. Weekly recitations will emphasize the analysis of real experimental data and understanding the applications of biophysical experimentation in published research papers. The problem sets emphasize use of PyMOL for analysis of macromolecular structures and use of standard curve-fitting software for analysis of protein binding data; detailed tutorials on the related methods are provided in the recitation sections. The first three modules will be covered in Biophysical Chemistry I during the fall term, while the final three will be covered in Biophysical Chemistry II during the spring term, and treatment of molecular dynamics calculations will be divided between the two terms.
In 1935, WEB Dubois wrote about abolition democracy: an idea based not only on breaking down unjust systems, but on building up new, antiracist social structures. Scholar activists like Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore and Mariame Kaba have long contended that the abolition of slavery was but one first step in ongoing abolitionist practices dismantling racialized systems of policing, surveillance and incarceration. The possibilities of prison and police abolition have recently come into the mainstream national consciousness during the 2020 resurgence of nationwide Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests. As we collectively imagine what nonpunitive and supportive community reinvestment in employment, education, childcare, mental health, and housing might look like, medicine must be a part of these conversations. Indeed, if racist violence is a public health emergency, and we are trying to bring forth a “public health approach to public safety” – what are medicine’s responsibilities to these social and institutional reinventions?
Medicine has a long and fraught history of racial violence. It was, after all, medicine and pseudoscientific inquiry that helped establish what we know as the racial categorizations of today: ways of separating human beings based on things like skin color and hair texture that were used (and often continue to be used) to justify the enslavement, exclusion, or genocide of one group of people by another. Additionally, the history of the professionalization of U.S. medicine, through the formation of medical schools and professional organizations as well as and the certification of trained physicians, is a history of exclusion, with a solidification of the identity of “physician” around upper middle class white masculinity. Indeed, the 1910 Flexner Report, whose aim was to make consistent training across the country’s medical schools, was explicit in its racism. From practices of eugenic sterilization, to histories of experimentation upon bodies of color, medicine is unfortunately built upon racist, sexist and able-ist practices.
This course is built on the premise that a socially just practice of medicine is a bioethical imperative. Such a practice cannot be achieved, however, without examining medicine’s histories of racism, as well as learning from and building upon histories of anti-racist health practice. The first half of the semester will be dedicated to learning about histories of medical racism: from eugenics and racist experiment
At once material and symbolic, our bodies exist at the intersection of multiple competing discourses, including the juridical, the techno-scientific, and the biopolitical. In this course, we will draw upon a variety of critical interdisciplinary literatures—including feminist and queer studies, science and technology studies, and disability studies—to consider some of the ways in which the body is constituted by such discourses, and itself serves as the substratum for social relations. Among the key questions we will consider are the following: What is natural about the body? How are distinctions made between presumptively normal and pathological bodies, and between psychic and somatic experiences? How do historical and political-economic forces shape the perception and meaning of bodily difference? And most crucially: how do bodies that are multiply constituted by competing logics of gender, race, nation, and ability offer up resistance to these and other categorizations?
Interface between clinical practice and quantitative radiation biology. Microdosimetry, dose-rate effects and biological effectiveness thereof; radiation biology data, radiation action at the cellular and tissue level; radiation effects on human populations, carcinogenesis, genetic effects; radiation protection; tumor control, normal-tissue complication probabilities; treatment plan optimization.
Explores cutting-edge field of cellular bioengineering and applications of cell therapies. Comprehensive understanding of the principles, techniques, and ethical considerations involved in cells for medical applications studied.
Complex reactive systems. Catalysis. Heterogeneous systems, with an emphasis on coupled chemical kinetics and transport phenomena. Reactions at interfaces (surfaces, aerosols, bubbles). Reactions in solution.
Fundamentals of catalyst design and characterization, kinetic modeling and interpretation, and reactor design for CO2 utilization technologies. Topics include tandem catalysis, fundamentals of electrocatalysis, heterogeneous catalysis, catalytic processes for the activation of CO2, and reactive capture. Course grades are based on evaluating case studies, quizzes, and the final project design, where students apply concepts learned in class to propose solutions for practical, real-world CO2 utilization challenges.
Direct stiffness approach for trusses. Strong and weak forms for one-dimensional problems. Galerkin finite element formulation, shape functions, Gauss quadrature, convergence. Multidimensional scalar field problems (heat conduction), triangular and rectangular elements, Isoparametric formulation. Multidimensional vector field problems (linear elasticity). Practical FE modeling with commercial software (ABAQUS). Computer implementation of the finite element method. Advanced topics. Not open to undergraduate students.
This course examines the history of the human body and the experience of bodily change in its cultural and religious contexts in the ancient Mediterranean and early Christian world. It focuses on how ancient writers and thinkers imagined what a body was, what a body could turn into, how a body should be treated, and what a body should be taught to do. These thinkers had very different ideas about bodies than contemporary humans do, and yet their ideas were also critical in shaping many of the ideas about bodies that we still have.
Guiding ideals in American architecture from the centennial to around 1960. The evolution of modernism in America is contrasted with European developments and related to local variants.
Prerequisites: RUSS UN3101 and RUSS UN3102 Third-Year Russian I and II, or placement test. Systematic study of problems in Russian syntax; written exercises, translations into Russian, and compositions. Conducted entirely in Russian.
Developments in architectural history during the modern period. Emphasis on moments of significant change in architecture (theoretical, economic, technological, and institutional). Themes include positive versus arbitrary beauty, enlightenment urban planning, historicism, structural rationalism, the housing reform movement, iron and glass technology, changes generated by developments external or internal to architecture itself and transformations in Western architecture.
Introduction to runoff and drainage systems in an urban setting, including hydrologic and hydraulic analyses, flow and water quality monitoring, common regulatory issues, and mathematical modeling. Applications to problems of climate variation, land use changes, infrastructure operation and receiving water quality, developed using statistical packages, public-domain models, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Team projects that can lead to publication quality analyses in relevant fields of interest. Emphasis on the unique technical, regulatory, fiscal, policy, and other interdisciplinary issues that pose a challenge to effective planning and management of urban hydrologic systems.
This introduction to German film since 1945 (in its European contexts) deploys a focus on feelings as a lens for multifaceted, intersectional investigations of cinematic history. We will explore how feelings have been gendered and racialized; how they overlap with matters of sex (as closely associated with political revolt in Western Europe, while considered too private for public articulation in the socialist East, especially when queer); and how they foreground matters of nation and trauma (for example via the notions of German ‘coldness’ and inability to mourn the Holocaust). Simultaneously, the focus on feelings highlights questions of mediality (cinema as a prototypically affective medium?), genre and avant-garde aesthetics: in many films, ‘high-affect’ Hollywood cinema intriguingly meets ‘cold’ cinematic modernism. In pursuing these investigative vectors through theoretical readings and close film analysis, the course connects affect, gender, queer, and cultural studies approaches with cinema studies methodologies. The films to be discussed span postwar and New German Cinema, East German DEFA productions, the ‘Berlin School’ of the 2000s, and contemporary transnational cinema.
Review of building energy modeling techniques for simulating time-varying demand. Detailed Physics-based models, gray-box and black-box modeling. Static and dynamic models of building energy systems. Deterministic and Stochastic occupancy modeling. Modeling of control and dispatch of HVAC and local energy systems. Implementation of models in Energyplus and Modelica platforms. Modeling of low and net-zero carbon buildings and local energy systems.
Is this cinema or television? Moving beyond the advent of streaming platforms like Netflix and the rise of “global television,” the course will examine the 1970s and 1980s, an exciting period of collaboration between public television and independent filmmakers around the world, in which coproductions between cinema and television proliferated. From a historical and theoretical perspective, we will study key debates around media specificity and convergence, television as a “utopia,” and the challenges of coproduction between the “North” and the “South,” among other issues. The course is an invitation to approach film and television histories through an interconnected approach (across media and across nations), while focusing on a wide range of directors from the U.S., Europe and the so-called “Global South” (these might include Rossellini, Fassbinder, Godard & Miéville, Burnett, Ruiz, Black Audio Film Collective, Sarmiento, etc.).
Introduction to power electronics; power semiconductor devices: power diodes, thyristors, commutation techniques, power transistors, power MOSFETs, Triac, IGBTs, etc. and switch selection; non-sinusoidal power definitions and computations, modeling, and simulation; half-wave rectifiers; single-phase, full-wave rectifiers; three-phase rectifiers; AC voltage controllers; DC/DC buck, boost, and buck-boost converters; discontinuous conduction mode of operation; DC power supplies: Flyback, Forward converter; DC/AC inverters, PWM techniques; three-phase inverters.
This seminar is one of the series “History of the Modern Self” which includes Montaigne, Rousseau, and soon Nietzsche. This semester will focus on Pascal’s conception of the self as revealed by his
humanistic
case for religious faith in response to the skeptical challenge of Montaigne. The aim is to understand all the implications of this encounter for the history of modern Western thought about human psychology, religion, and politics.
Premodern Chinese literati have long been regarded as active historical agents who shaped “This Culture of Ours”—a metonym for civilization in the premodern Sinitic context—while they also fed from, partook in, and influenced popular and foreign cultures. Besides “literary writings” like poetry and prose, literati also engaged in calligraphy, painting, and antiquarianism under the umbrella term of “literary or cultural arts.” In turn, the creation and appreciation of artwork were intrinsic to the aesthetic life of literati community and further established their self-identity. At the same time, social exclusivity, (self-)doubt and identity crises, along with the looming threat of cultural decline, have continually haunted this literati community throughout the ages.
Covering the long trajectory of imperial China, this course reveals the birth and development of literati culture. In particular, we take an interdisciplinary approach, introducing intellectual and poetic discourses, socio-historical contexts, literary criticism, visual and material culture, to envision a “common ground” for their civil world. Textual, visual sources plus material objects are meant to have conversations with each other in this course. Important issues include historical transformations of the elite class, cultural geography in different eras, materiality and visuality of elite calligraphy and painting, literati self-expression through aesthetic practice, the roles of the court and literati in producing and preserving art, as well as other relevant issues such as gender studies, vernacular literature, and commodity society.
This course is cross-listed in AMEC and CPLT. For undergraduates, no background in Chinese language is required in this course, and all reading materials—either translation of primary sources or secondary scholarship—are accessible in English.
The objective of this course is to develop understanding of how political institutions and behavior shape economic outcomes, and vice versa. Starting from the micro level study of political behavior, we will build up to analyze the internal workings of institutions and ultimately macro level economic and political outcomes. During the course we will cover the following topics
• Limits and potential of markets
• Public goods provision
• Voting
• Redistribution
Prerequisites: LING UN3101 An investigation of the sounds of human language, from the perspective of phonetics (articulation and acoustics, including computer-aided acoustic analysis) and phonology (the distribution and function of sounds in individual languages).
In this course we will examine the New Testament canon and the twenty-seven texts that comprise it in light of their respective literary genres, their Jewish antecedents and Greco-Roman influences, which will include their historical, social, cultural, political and economic contexts, and the ways these factors impinged upon their various dimensions of meaning. Various modes of biblical interpretation, both ancient and contemporary, will be explored. A major emphasis will be on the ways select texts are utilized, misconstrued and weaponized in the public sphere in this contemporary moment.
The quarter century during which Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union witnessed some of the twentieth century's most dramatic events: history's fastest plunge into modernity, an apocalyptic world war, and the emergence of a socialist state as a competitive world power. This tutorial will offer students a deep dive not only into the historical depths of the Stalin era but into the gloriously complex historiographical debates that surround it. Some of the questions that will animate the readings, writings, and discussions that students will engage in are as follows: Did Stalin depart from or represent a continuation of the policies introduced by his predecessor Vladimir Lenin? Did he rule in a totalitarian fashion or in ways comparable to other twentieth century regimes? Were his policies destructive or possibly productive? And perhaps most boggling of all: why did no one resist Stalinist rule?
Zero-credit course. Primer on quantitative and mathematical concepts. Required for all incoming MSOR and MSIE students.
“Wall Street is a disaster area”—so declared a real estate lawyer in a 1974
New York Times
story on the pitiful state of lower Manhattan. The World Trade Center had been inaugurated in 1973 as a beacon of global capitalism with a mandate to lease only to international firms. A year later, much of the Twin Towers went unoccupied. Some eight million square feet of financial district office space sat empty, brokerage houses were shuttering at a rate of more than one per day, and the surrounding city was hurtling towards a full-blown fiscal crisis. The New York of the mid-1970s did not appear destined to become the model global city we know today. Within a decade, however, the city had transformed into a central node—arguably
the
central node—in the ballooning global financial industry and its accompanying class and cultural formations. But this outcome was never guaranteed. How did New York go from “Fear City” to “Capital of the World”? What historical structures, contingencies, and policy decisions produced Global New York?
This course examines New York City’s long history as a site of globalization. Since European colonization, New York has served as a hub in world-spanning networks of capital, goods, and people.
At the same time, the city’s reinvention in the late-20th century as a “global city”—defined in large part by its deep embeddedness in world financial markets—represented a fundamental shift in the city’s economy, governance, demography, cultural life, and social relations.
We will interrogate how this came to be by exploring New York’s historical role in global business, culture, and immigration, with attention to how local and national conditions have shaped the city’s relationship to the world. While critically analyzing how elites both in and outside New York have wielded power over its politics and institutions, readings and discussions will also center the voices of New Yorkers drawn from the numerous and diverse communities that make up this complex city.
Chemical engineering fundamentals as applied to process research, development, and manufacturing of pharmaceutical products. Course topics include: comprehensive overview of the biopharmaceutical business (therapeutic areas, markets, drug discovery, clinical development, commercialization), process research, creation, development, optimization, sustainability, green chemistry and engineering, safety (patient, process, and personnel), unit operations and associated calculations relevant to pharmaceutical processes, process scale-up, implementation, assessment, technology transfer, new technologies, economic analysis, drug product formulation and manufacturing, and regulatory considerations. Case studies and real-life examples are presented throughout the course.
Interpret financial statements, build cash flow models, value projects, value companies, and make Corporate Finance decisions. Additional topics include: cost of capital, dividend policy, debt policy, impact of taxes, Shareholder/Debtholder agency costs, dual-class shares, using option pricing theory to analyze management behavior, investment banking activities, including equity underwriting, syndicated lending, venture capital, private equity investing and private equity secondaries. Application of theory in real-world situations: analyzing financial activities of companies such as General Electric, Google, Snapchat, Spotify, and Tesla.
Generation of random numbers from given distributions; variance reduction; statistical output analysis; introduction to simulation languages; application to financial, telecommunications, computer, and production systems. Graduate students must register for 3 points. Undergraduate students must register for 4 points. Note: Students who have taken IEOR E4703 Monte Carlo simulation may not register for this course for credit. Recitation section required.
Required for undergraduate students majoring in OR:FE and OR. A mathematically rigorous study of game theory and auctions, and their application to operations management. Topics include introductory game theory, private value auction, revenue equivalence, mechanism design, optimal auction, multiple-unit auctions, combinatorial auctions, incentives, and supply chain coordination with contracts. No previous knowledge of game theory is required.
Planar resonators. Photons and photon streams. Photons and atoms: energy levels and band structure; interactions of photons with matter; absorption, stimulated and spontaneous emission; thermal light, luminescence light. Laser amplifiers: gain, saturation, and phase shift; rate equations; pumping. Lasers: theory of oscillation; laser output characteristics. Photons in semiconductors: generation, recombination, and injection; heterostructures; absorption and gain coefficients. Semiconductor photon sources: LEDs; semiconductor optical amplifiers; homojunction and heterojunction laser diodes. Semiconductor photon detectors: p-n, p-i-n, and heterostructure photo diodes; avalanche photodiodes.
This course asks a simple question: what kind of action (political, social, instrumental) can a novel take? In the seminar, we will consider the tradition of protest fiction— or what we might call Books that Change the World— taking stock of how the novel has embraced the overt aim of creating change. Our goal as a class will be to set our own terms for what a protest novel is, was, should be, or might be, and to consider both the reach and limitations of this tradition. The terrain is broad, covering works from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, with a center of gravity in the early-mid 20th century, and engaging a range of topics on which novels have sought to make change.
The course is organized thematically and chronologically, with works (mostly English language) from the U.S., England, Ireland, Canada, India, Nigeria, and elsewhere. Each week we will read a novel, occasionally paired with other materials, such as visual works, other literary materials, theoretical readings, etc. Themes to which these activist works are geared include: slavery and abolition; working conditions; sexuality, gender and patriarchy; war, peace, and revolution; race and racism; incarceration; and environmental crisis. This is a discussion seminar, and each student is expected to participate in every class meeting.
The problem of women lies at the heart of everything Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote. He posited a basic equality between the sexes in the state of nature, while prescribing a radically restrictive view of women’s education. He founded his political thought on models of virility, while writing a best-selling novel featuring a powerful heroine who governs an ideal society. He upheld rigid gender binaries, while fashioning himself as a woman in his autobiographical writings. The goal of this seminar will be to tease out these and other tensions and contradictions in Rousseau’s work and to explore how they have shaped modern views of women and gender. We will read Rousseau in dialogue with the many women who responded to his work, whether by emulating his style, seeking his counsel or subjecting his ideas to virulent critique.
The seminar will be taught in French and fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the French major and the MA and PhD in French. Undergraduates with an advanced level of French are welcome to enroll.
Two-body orbital motion, Newtonian and Keplerian mechanics, energy and angular momentum conservation, Vis-Viva equation, Kepler’s Equation, Euclidean geometry, vector mathematics, conic sections. Trajectory design using analytical and software-based methods. Systems Tool Kit Astrogator for simulation of Earth-Moon and interplanetary missions.
Science and technology have become increasingly central to the basic functioning of democratic societies The administrative state, both on the local and national level, is dependent on technological systems to ensure democratic rule and deliver services: from voting machines and welfare databases to passport scanners and the laboratory equipment necessary to set environmental standards. Just as necessary are the numerous experts – engineers, statisticians, epidemiologists, and environmental scientists – who either work for or advise the state in its dealings. How should we think about the technocratic nature of modern democracy? Is it an inevitable and necessary pre-condition for governing modern mass society? Or is it an alarming aspect, an undemocratic impulse, that undermines the promise of democratic rule?The course will examine the coproduction of science and politics. In the first part of the semester, students will gain conceptual tools with which to rethink the connection between science, technology, power, politics, policy, and democracy. They will consider the role of expertise in modern politics, as well as the construction of the public. In the second part of the semester we will consider in greater detail the way technocratic governance developed in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment.
Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 ECON GU4400 is strongly recommended. What differences does race make in the U.S. economy? Why does it make these differences? Are these differences things we should be concerned about? If so, what should be done? The course examines labor markets, housing markets, capital markets, crime, education, and the links among these markets. Both empirical and theoretical contributions are studied.