This class examines how citizens, leaders, interest groups and activists work to reshape our understanding of problems over time and investigates why some problems gain policy attention while others languish. The class emphasizes the complexity of understanding, designing, and implementing large scale policies that attempt to address problems that are ultimately experienced by people in specific contexts and communities.

This course is intended for participants in the Undergraduate Student Opportunities in Academic Research (USOAR) program.

Explores principles and applications of data ethics within a broader social framework that prioritizes conversations about policy, regulatory frameworks, accountability, transparency, and governance models. Will discuss who is responsible for doing responsible data science, question how our work shapes the world around us, and understand the impacts of big data on people and communities.

Drawing on social science research, this course explores how public leaders contribute to problem identification, issue framing, policy adoption, crisis management, and organizational and societal change. The course will clarify the relationships among key concepts including leadership and followership, authority and influence, reciprocity and persuasion, and examine the role of contextual factors in shaping the strategies of 21st century leaders

This course will center on exposing students to contemporary pipelines for data analysis through a series of steadily escalating use cases. The course will begin with simple local database construction such as SQLite and evolve to cloud base systems such as AWS or Google Cloud. This progression will include topics such as data lakes and other non-SQL applications as appropriate.

Students will survey the main currents of US & international sustainability policy (air & water quality, endangered species protection, public land management, private land conservation), consider their origins in conservation thought, and learn to evaluate these policies via examples and assignments from current natural resource and environmental challenges. Students will learn about the actors and processes by which policy decisions are made.

This class is an introduction to Latin dancing including Salsa, Bachata, Merengue, Cha-cha and other forms of Latin partner dance. We will cover the fundamentals of leading and following, as well as beginner and intermediate dance patterns, musicality, and styling for each dance.

Covers the fundamentals of probability theory & stochastic processes. Become conversant in the tools of probability. Clearly describe & implement concepts related to random variables, properties of probability, distributions, expectations, moments, transformations, model fit, basic inference, sampling distributions, discrete & continuous time Markov chains, & Brownian motion. Illustrate most topics with both analytic & computational solutions.

An overview of the fields of social psychology and behavioral science. We will explore behavioral research in basic social psychology, leadership and organizational behavior, and the ways in which social science methods and research are currently being used in public policy and to solve major societal problems. The ultimate goal is to teach students how to think like behavioral scientists.

Investigates a selected issue in public policy or leadership.