Stephanie Bogart, Ph.D.
An interdisciplinary course discovering the evolutionary, cultural, and environmental factors in the emergence and existence of human diseases with a focus on the Darwinian examination of illness and medicine. Students will be able to identify, describe, explain, and apply factual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge in human evolution relating to disease. This course will integrate different sources and types of knowledge into holistic perspectives about specific pathogens and the pathways of risk to humans, as well as human responses through medicine. Focus will be instructional topic lectures with associated seminar discussions of current publications relating to evolutionary medicine. Students will research a specific illness to understand the evolutionary underpinnings leading to the disease, human treatments, genetic impacts/coevolution, and cultural influences on human-disease interactions. The results of this project will be presented to the rest of the students in a final thesis.