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Scanning electron microscopes are a fundamental tool in the physical and life sciences. When equipped with an X-Ray spectrometer, a SEM can provide rapid physical and chemical data of specimens on extremely small scales. This class with cover the theory and practical applications of SEM imaging and analysis for advanced science students who have their own research interests. Students will be expected to develop and conduct an independent research project through this class.

In this course, students will learn the fundamentals of observing the night sky with a telescope. This course will teach how to find the basic constellations and how to use both manual and computerized telescopes to point at celestial objects in the night sky. While there will be some classroom time to teach fundamental concepts, the vast majority of the class will consist of practical, hands-on time with telescopes at Stickney Observatory.

Physics is the study of what Newton called “the System of the World.” To know the System of the World is to know what forces are out there and how those forces operate on things. These forces explain the dynamics of the world around us: from the path of a falling apple to the motion of a car down the highway to the flight of a rocket from the Earth. Careful analysis of the forces that govern these motions reveal countless insights about the world around you and enable you to look at that world with new eyes.

Fake news, reality television, “IRL” – asserting the veracity of our perceptions is a constant preoccupation in contemporary culture. What is real? Realism is a widely used term with multiple connotations: verisimilitude, authenticity, objectivity, truth, fact.

This course is for experienced student artists with a firm commitment to serious work in the studio. Students will work primarily on self-directed projects in an effort to refine individual concerns and subject matter. Students will present work regularly for critique in class as well as for individual studio meetings with the instructor. Development of a strong work ethic will be crucial.

The comforts and amenities of modern life require vast inputs of energy to power an industrial society. While the benefits of industrial society are significant, if unevenly shared, the environmental costs of energy extraction and production are significant. These environmental costs are also unevenly shared.

This course introduces a variety of materials, techniques and approaches to working with oil paint. Emphasis is placed on developing and understanding of color, form and space as well as individual research and conceptual concerns. The daily experience of seeing, along with examples from art history and contemporary art, provide a base from which investigations are made. Formal, poetic, and social implications within paintings both from class and from a wide-ranging selection of practicing artists are examined and discussed. Students complete work weekly.

Chromophilia, refers to intense passion and love for color. What is it about color that has the power to induce reverie, and conversely to manipulate, or disgust? How does color work? What is the role of color in visual art? In language? How do we understand and respond to color from phenomenological, poetic, philosophical, and societal vantage points? How as artists can we become effective stewards of our passionately-loved and yet ever-shifting chroma?

This intermediate level painting course will take as its platform the investigation of writing by artists about art and artists. While developing their own self-defined studio practices, students will engage with primary documents of art history - artists' essays, letters and sketchbooks.

I would (and will) argue that Newton's Principia is the most important book yet written. It is certainly the most important book that a vanishingly small number of people have actually read.

Contemporary efforts to confront our most pressing ecological problems are characterized by a tension between the global realities of these problems and the territorial borders and logics that define sovereign nation-states. This course will explore this tension in three parts. First, we will engage with a variety of theoretical and conceptual debates introduced by scholars of global environmental politics — a heterodox field that draws insights from international relations theory, international political economy, ecological economics, and environmental sociology (among others).

In this wide-ranging introduction to the study of international politics, we will be exploring how states and non-state actors negotiate their interactions in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent and globalized world.

This course will serve as an introduction to working with circuits in a lab setting. We will learn about the relatively simple rules necessary for working with analog circuits and how those rules can be used to build objects of growing complexity. We will then move on to understanding how to build circuits that can measure properties of and interact with their surroundings.

Plastic pollution has emerged as a significant environmental issue in the past few years, particularly on how plastics affects health, environmental justice, climate change and water quality.  This is an environmental policy class iwth a focus on public action.  This class will explore the dimensions of the production, use and disposal of plastics and the need for innovation.  In the spirit of 51��������'s Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA),much of the assigned homework will include taking public action.