The world has become datafied (measured, classified, digitized, sold, amassed as data), and visualizations are a potent public medium. They drive critical concerns like global warming and inequality, and can be used with many other disciplinary issues. We connect data vis to our challenges to intelligibly represent the complex relationships, forces, and multiple scales embedded in ethnographic settings and theories. If data vis gives us a grip on these imperceptible factors, and the datafied world, what gets filtered out of data or optics? We will critically use data vis tools alongside other modalities to enrich our anthropological vision.

Roman history courses usually cover grand narratives based on literary evidence and usually no room for discussing how knowledge is created and the different methods for studying ancient history. This course instead looks at different questions to shed light in fruitful collaborations between scholars from different fields. Students will engage with STEM and digital humanities methods as they consider historical questions. Through different case studies and hands-on activities, students will learn how different scientific, technological, and computational methods help us employ a multi-disciplinary approach to learning about the ancient past.

Artificial intelligence existed in fiction well before the first computer was built. In fact, storytelling and AI appear to be inseparable: apart from countless science-fiction works, stories ranging from mass unemployment to doomsday scenarios have become entangled with real-world AI and its development. This class studies some iconic representations of AI in the arts alongside non-fiction texts that shed some light on how AI works, its potentialities, limits, and biases. In so doing, we will make sense of the stories that we read about AI, and reflect on whether the former can teach us anything about the latter.

This lecture and lab course will acquaint non-biology majors with modern molecular biology focusing on topics of current interest to society. The course covers fundamental topics such as information storage and readout by DNA, RNA and proteins. The course addresses how recent scientific advances influence issues relevant to humanity including stem cells and CRISPR; the human microbiome and bacterial pathogens; vaccines and the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic; how a single cell contains all the necessary instructions to build a complex multicellular organism; and how the human genome can be used to understand the evolution of modern humans.

When something seems to defy our understanding of how the world works, we would call it magical. Throughout human history, development of new materials was associated with magic because it made things that were formerly impossible or incomprehensible possible. The durability of a steel tool must have seemed magical for the bronze age worker. The Internet, instant access to all information of humankind at the touch of a button would have been incomprehensible a hundred years ago.This class will talk about the magic materials people encountered throughout history, what equates to magic materials today and how might they shape our future.

STC 209 examines 'transformations' within and between visuals, sound, structure and movement as art and engineering forms. The course explores generative art and design that leverages parallels and interplay between design processes in engineering and the arts. Students will learn to work as artist-engineers, and will create ambitious open-ended design projects exploring these themes. Taught by faculty from CST, COS, MUS, CEE along with visiting artists, and guest faculty from the Lewis Center for the Arts.

STC 209 examines 'transformations' within and between visuals, sound, structure and movement as art and engineering forms. The course explores generative art and design that leverages parallels and interplay between design processes in engineering and the arts. Students will learn to work as artist-engineers, and will create ambitious open-ended design projects exploring these themes. Taught by faculty from CST, COS, MUS, CEE along with visiting artists, and guest faculty from the Lewis Center for the Arts.

This course is a collaboration between science and creative expression. Students will develop an understanding of the fundamental role that microbes (viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms) have played in environmental stability and human evolution. We will then explore the impact of microbes on climate change and discuss innovation and solutions. Concurrently, we will be exploring various forms of creative expression (writing, movement, improvisation, image making, etc.), with which to playfully observe, meditate and communicate the scientific material. Students will collaborate on final creative projects.