How do culture, science, and human expression shape our health?

Yue Jiang, Associate Professor of the Practice, Statistical Science 

How do we know smoking “causes” cancer? Is it true that cereal marketed to children is more likely to be placed on lower shelves? How can we summarize and visualize thousands or millions of observations at once? This course provides a rigorous introduction to health data science using current applications in biomedical research, epidemiology, and health policy. Using modern statistical software, students will conduct reproducible data exploration, visualization, and analysis. Students will interpret and translate results for interdisciplinary researchers and critically evaluate data-based claims, decisions, and policies. No statistics or computing background is necessary or expected. 

Cross-list: GLHLTH 198CNL

Elaine Guevara, Lecturer, Evolutionary Anthropology 

Humans inhabit every major biome on Earth—from the Arctic tundra to the Sahara Desert to the high Himalayas. How did our species survive the ice ages and spread across the globe? And how did our drastic alterations of our environment come to shape our biology? This course covers the evolution of the human adaptive package, ancient human migrations, and the ways humans both shape our environments and are shaped by our surroundings through acclimatization, developmental and behavioral adaptation, and natural selection. We will explore major events in human history, including the rise of agriculture and the demographic and epidemiological changes brought by industrialization. Throughout the course, we examine how genetic, environmental, and social factors interact to influence biology and health. Students will also evaluate modern concepts of ancestry, common misconceptions about human variation, and ethical concerns in studying human biology and evolution.

Roseen Giles, Associate Professor, Music 

Music has always been a great deal more than entertainment: it is a fundamental tool for understanding the natural world and the functions of the human body. Music is at the seam between the physical and mental: highly mathematical, measurable, and precise, but also magical, mysterious, and capable of speaking to the irrationality of human emotion. This course will explore the history of music and medicine  to consider the intertwined histories of art and science through topics such as music and healing; musical understandings in human anatomy; harmony in the natural world; cultural studies of music and health; philosophy of sound in cosmology; and music as treatment in the history of medicine. Drawing on a variety of readings, including primary source material from Da Vinci, Galileo, and Kepler, to contemporary debates on the efficacy of music in healing and prevention of disease, this course will introduce you to the close connections that have, and continue to exist between the arts and science. You will be encouraged to think critically about the relationships between the arts and the science of healing, between emotional response and objectivity, and between scientific knowledge and cultural practice. In short, the objective of this course is to understand how human creativity—the making and unmaking of what is true and what is false—has driven new discoveries in the science of medicine as much as it has in the art of music. A particular emphasis will be placed on consulting primary sources both digitally and in person at the special collections housed at Duke’s Rubenstein Library. Open to all students with or without a background in music.

Cary Moskovitz, Professor of the Practice, Thompson Writing Program 

Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease, kills over one million people each year--mostly young African children. Mosquitoes also transmit dengue hemorrhagic fever, the most rapidly spreading vector borne disease with 50 million infections now occurring annually. Ticks spread diseases such as Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Lyme Disease, Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever and more. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently noted that while 30,000 cases of Lyme disease are reported annually in the U.S., “the true incidence is 10 times that number.” Given the need for better repellents, new approaches such as clip-on and spatial repellent devices and permethrin-treated clothing are enticing. But how can we know how effective these novel repellents are at keeping mosquitos and ticks away? In this section of Writing 120, students will study the recent scientific literature on repellants as the focus for developing skills in academic reading, writing, giving and receiving feedback, and library research. Working from select principles of health science research and some basic statistics, students will practice careful reading, effective summary, and skeptical analysis as they draft and revise reviews of recent experimental research reports. Building on what they learn in the first half of the term, students will then write substantive scientific essays that make an evidence-based argument on a topic related to reducing vector-borne diseases. Audiences for student writing include classmates and health-science professionals.  Note: this course involves a considerable amount of collaborative work; students should have schedules and attitudes that will allow them to work extensively with classmates outside of class time. Prior coursework in statistics is useful but not required.

Emily Parks, Lecturing Fellow, Thompson Writing Program 

Can brain scans reveal whether someone is lying?  Is there such a thing as a "criminal mind"?  Do we have free will, or can we blame the brain for our moral shortcomings? 

This course will introduce you to the goals and practices of academic writing as we evaluate how neuroscience can inform ethical, legal, and medical questions of our time. We will engage with themes both ancient and modern, asking how neuroscience can enhance our understanding of the human mind – and how that understanding, driven by cutting-edge advances in brain imaging, can impact our modern society. Along the way, we will examine scientific inquiry itself – the collaborative process through which scientists work together to develop and communicate ideas. You will experience this process firsthand, taking on several roles over the semester: the scholar learning to respond to scientific texts; the ambassador deciphering complex research for a broader audience; and the researcher, collaborating with others to generate and synthesize new ideas. Across the semester, you will complete two major writing projects: a scholarly perspective essay and a scientific literature review. Both projects will synthesize neuroscientific research to address a societal issue— such as the ethics of brain implants, disease treatment, social media addiction— and will be written collaboratively, mirroring the practices of professional scholars. This course is well suited for students interested in neuroscience, psychology, or biology. It is grounded in three core principles. First, writing is a vehicle for critical thinking—a tool for bridging the classroom and the real-world. Second, strong writing depends on revision, and you will regularly practice giving and receiving meaningful peer feedback. Third, scientific innovation depends on collaboration.