Research & Teaching

This is an interdisciplinary graduate-level and advanced undergraduate-level course in which students explore topics in molecular microbiology, microbial diversity, and microbially-mediated geochemistry in depth. This course will be taught by faculty from the Microbial Sciences Initiative.

Within our solar system, Earth is distinguished as the planet with life. Life was born of planetary processes, has been sustained for some four billion years by planetary processes, and through time has emerged as a set of planetary processes that is important in its own right.

This course will expose students to concepts of tropical biology and tropical biodiversity. A pre-semester three-week January, 2020, field trip to Australia is recommended.  Pre-planning meetings will take place in the fall.

Wildlife, vegetation, soil, air, water, and aquatic ecosystems, together with their human uses, are related to the distinctive, especially spatial, attributes of suburban and urban landscapes.

Fundamental concepts and formalisms of conservation of energy and increase of entropy as applied to natural and engineered environmental and biological systems.

Fundamental concepts and formalisms of conservation of energy and increase of entropy as applied to natural and engineered environmental and biological systems.

This introductory course introduces students to geospatial data, methods, and tools used for the study of global environmental change.

As human population grows, our collective influence is becoming an almost ubiquitous feature in the natural world, and the marine environment is no exception.

Even as we recognize that human well-being depends on the natural environment, we are experiencing unprecedented environmental challenges largely as a consequence of unsustainable interactions with nature.

From one’s first thought in the morning (“how hot will it be today?”), to a concern over the future of our climate (“how hot will it be in 2100?”), temperature is a ubiquitous topic in our lives. But what exactly does temperature measure?

Our understanding of Earth has changed radically in the last two centuries: after many years of debate, many major questions have come to be seen as largely answered. It is now accepted that the planet formed over 4.5 billion years ago; that the Earth’s surface is made of rigid segments—called pl

Confronting the reality of environmental degradation requires more than remote sensing, statistical analysis or institutional restructuring. As images of the changing planet become emblematic of our time, designers are responding with a scrutiny towards amplified scales and extreme events.

Land and water conservation has become an important tool for both sustainable development and biodiversity conservation around the world. More than 15 percent of the world's terrestrial area and 10 percent of coastal waters are now encompassed within protected areas.

This section gives new History concentrators an introduction to environmental history. Most historians leave the natural world out of the story, but environmental historians regard nature as the inescapable context for human history, including the human impact on nature.

This seminar examines the world’s systems for the production and distribution of food as they relate to the earth’s physical, chemical, and biological systems.  Using scientific readings, papers about economics and politics, and cases about firms, we consider agriculture and food from scientific,

Selected topics in the history of the North American coastal zone, including the seashore as wilderness, as industrial site, as area of recreation, and as artistic subject; the shape of coastal landscape for conflicting uses over time; and the perception of the seashore as marginal zone in litera

This course will explore the intersection between religious traditions and ecological activism, with special attention to current conversations about "ethical eating." We will consider both the resources that religious traditions provide to ecological activists and the ways these activists have c