Course Descriptions

Water and Diplomacy: Integration of Science, Engineering, and Negotiations
It is often said that "water is the new oil." Indeed, water promises to be the resource that determines many countries' wealth, welfare, and stability in the 21st century. The nature of water as a resource is changing. Water resources are increasingly over-used, water quality is sub-optimal, and ecological integrity is excessively taxed. Such tensions are exacerbated at dynamic political, physical, cultural, and economic boundaries. A changing world requires a changing education. This interdisciplinary seminar -- co-taught by faculty from Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and the Fletcher School of Diplomacy -- is designed to encourage students to think across boundaries, emphasize knowledge integration, and link information to action. The goal is to combine multiple perspectives in order to explore solutions to water conflicts and the negotiations required to achieve those solutions. The seminar will emphasize collaborative learning opportunities, co-teaching of classes by students and faculty, and integrative activities that span disciplinary, physical, and political boundaries. Students will collectively produce a state-of-knowledge "white paper" that will be disseminated to a global audience and revised by future students and faculty.

Faculty:
Shafiqul Islam
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Associate Dean of Research
School of Engineering

William Moomaw
Professor
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

Jay Shimshack
Assistant Professor of Economics
School of Arts and Sciences

One Health: Interdisciplinary Approaches to People, Animals and the Environment
Emerging challenges to human, animal and ecosystem health demand novel solutions. New diseases are emerging from unique configurations of humans, their domestic animals and wildlife; significant new pressures on once robust and resilient ecosystems are compromising their integrity; synthetic compounds and engineered organisms, recently introduced to the natural world, are spreading unpredictably around the globe. Globalization is also providing opportunities for infectious organisms to gain access to naive hosts, which in turn leads to changing patterns of disease distribution and virulence. Faculty from all three campuses will provide expertise and guidance for individual and group teaching and learning, to help better understand the complex nature of these problems and to reveal innovative solutions. Students will examine and represent their discipline's perspective and tools to other group members; learn and incorporate other disciplines into their own thinking; and collaborate with others on the development of new, synthesized solutions. The course will explore interdisciplinary team-oriented approaches to complex health problems and set a framework for similar cross-school collaborative learning and teaching experiences at Tufts.

Faculty:
Gretchen Kaufman
Assistant Professor of Wildlife Medicine in the Department of Environmental and Population Health,
and Director of the Tufts Center for Conservation Medicine
Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine

Joann M. Lindenmayer
Associate Professor of Public Health in the Department of Environmental and Population Health
Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine

J. Michael Reed
Professor of Biology
School of Arts & Sciences

Elena N. Naumova
Associate Professor of Public Health and Family Medicine
Director of the Tufts Initiative for the Forecasting and Modeling of Infectious Diseases
Tufts University School of Medicine

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