COURSE Overview

“Public Health 101. A Sustainable World: Challenges and Opportunities”

PH101 is a 3-unit interdisciplinary course in which students take an active role as part of Problem Based Learning (PBL).

Each week, different faculty members and invited experts will discuss one or more issues concerning sustainability. Topics may include energy consumption, food security, population growth and family planning, migration, climate change, governance, and more.

Given the uncertainty of on-campus classes, this course may become a fully on-line course or a hybrid course.

These weekly lectures are accompanied by student panels that focus on case studies presenting real-life problems. Discussion sections are led by Student Scholars, undergraduates who have already taken the course and now serve as facilitators. All PH101 students will be encouraged to propose original, creative solutions to the challenges presented by the case studies. Students can prepare presentations, posters, videos, blogs or any other creative means of communicating their ideas for their final class project.

In their professional and personal lives, students now attending Berkeley will confront an extremely difficult set of challenges. Economic growth cannot continue exponentially in a finite world. Human activity and human numbers threaten irreversible damage to the fragile biosphere on which all life depends. Public Health strategies play a key role in understanding and addressing these truly existential threats.

The objective of PH 101 is to provide the current generation of students with evidence-based tools and skills they can utilize to understand and help address problems of sustainability.

Don’t just discuss problems. Develop solutions!