Cornell University Registrar

Program Description

Cornell’s Division of Nutritional Sciences offers a minor in global health.  This program is intended to complement any academic major at the University and provide students with basic knowledge about global health, as well as the necessary skills and experience to build their own unique global health career.  For more information, visit the Global Health Minor website.

Other anthropologically-relevant study abroad options, using existing Cornell Abroad and off-campus options, can be worked out in consultation with the major advisor and Cornell Abroad.

Minor Requirements

Experiential Learning Opportunity Requirement

A critical element of the Global Health Minor is an approved, eight-week experiential learning opportunity (ELO) during which students engage with a resource-limited population either in the United States or abroad. Students are challenged to apply their classroom learning to a field setting and deepen their understanding of the health problems that disproportionately affect underserved communities.

The learning outcomes of the ELO are as follows:

At the completion of this experiential learning opportunity, students will be able to:

• Identify a global or public health issue, through engagement in practice, policy, or research, which you intend to analyze in great depth in NS 4600.
• Examine and explain the key characteristics and interests of host organization, hospital, institution, or research project, and how they relate to specific global or public health issues of interest.
• Analyze a global or public health issue integrating academic knowledge and experiential learning.
• Document and explain how the applied experience advanced academic, professional, and personal learning goals.

Before completing an ELO, students must:

• Successfully complete NS 2600: Introduction to Global Health.
• Submit an ELO Petition Form for review by the DNS Petition Review Team.

After completing an ELO, students must:

• Successfully complete NS 4600.

Course Requirements

Course List

Code	Title	Hours
Required Courses 1
NS 2600	Introduction to Global Health	3
NS 4600	Explorations in Global and Public Health	3

¹

both courses must be taken for a letter grade to fulfill the minor requirement.

Elective Course Requirement

Students must complete a total of 9 credits of elective courses. All elective courses used to fulfill the minor requirements must be taken for a letter grade. These three courses must be distributed across three out of the five following Elective Course categories:

Category I. Biomedical & Epidemiological Approaches to Global Health

Includes courses encompassing a ‘hard science” approach to the study of disease and epidemiology. Surveys both communicable and parasitic vectors commonly occurring in resource-poor as well as nutritional and environmental foundations of increasingly prevalent non-communicable disease.

Course List

Code	Title	Hours
BIOMI 2500	Public Health Microbiology	3
BIOMI 2600	Microbiology of Human Contagious Diseases	3
BIOMI 2950	Biology of Infectious Disease: From Molecules to Ecosystems	3
BIOMI 3210	The Gut Microbiome	3
BIOMI 4040	Pathogenic Bacteriology	2-3
BIOMI 4090	Principles of Virology	3
BIOMI 4310	Medical Parasitology	2
BIOMS 4150	Essential Immunology	3
BIOMS 4340	Cellular and Molecular Microbial Pathogenesis: The Host Pathogen Interplay	3
ENTOM 2100	Plagues and People	3
FDSC 4220	Foods, Dietary Supplements, and Health	2
NS 3030	Nutrition, Health and Vegetarian Diets	3
NS 3060	Nutrition and Global Health	3
NS 3150	Obesity and the Regulation of Body Weight	3
NS 3600	Epidemiology	3
NS 4200	Diet and the Microbiome	3
NS 4410	Nutrition and Disease	4
NS 6140	Maternal and Child Nutrition and Health	3
PLSCI 4070	Nutritional Quality Improvement of Food Crops	2

Category III. Political, Economic & Food Systems Approaches to Global Health

Addresses local and global economic and political forces which influence the healthcare system of a region and its development. Educates students on subjects ranging from studies of agriculture and food system regulations to formulating balanced policy recommendations. This category focuses mainly on nutritional public policy from its basis in agro-economic theory to specific application to developing political systems.

Course List

Code	Title	Hours
AEM 1600	The Business of Modern Medicine	1.5
AEM 2000	Contemporary Controversies in the Global Economy	3
AEM 3385	Social Entrepreneurship Practicum: Anabel's Grocery	3
AEM 4450	Toward a Sustainable Global Food System: Food Policy for Developing Countries	3
COMM 2850	Communication, Environment, Science, and Health	3
ECON 3710	The Economics of Risky Health Behaviors	4
ECON 3910	Health, Poverty, and Inequality: A Global Perspective	3
ECON 6410	Health Economics I	3
ECON 6420	Health Economics II	3
ECON 7711	Microeconomics of Development: Applications to Health, Nutrition and Education	3
GDEV 3020	Political Ecologies of Health	3
GDEV 3400	Agriculture, Food, Sustainability and Social Justice	3
GDEV 4140	Global Cropping Systems and Sustainable Development	3
NS 4480	Economics of Food and Malnutrition	3
PUBPOL 2350	The U.S. Health Care System	3
PUBPOL 3870	Economic Evaluations in Health Care	3
PUBPOL 4110	Pollution, Climate Change, and Health	3
PUBPOL 4370	The Economics of Health Care Markets	3

Category IV. Health Systems & Programmatic Approaches to Global Health

Course List

Code	Title	Hours
AEM 4880	Global Food, Energy, and Water Nexus – Engage the US, China, and India for Sustainable Future	3-4
BEE 2510	Engineering Processes for Environmental Sustainability	3
BEE 3299	Sustainable Development	3
ENGRG 3400	Engineering Student Project Teams	1-3
DEA 2700	Healthy Places: Design, Planning and Public Health	3
DEA 5305	Health and Healing Studio	4
ILROB 4710	Social Science Research Methods	3
NS 4030	Teaching Apprenticeship 1	1-5
PUBPOL 5449	Systems Thinking Modeling	3
PLSCI 2100	Medical Ethnobotany	3
PLSCI 3100	Medicinal Botany and Drug Discovery	2

¹

only for NS 2600, 3610, 4600, 4620, 4630 or 4631

Category V. Area-Specific Studies (Petition-Only)

Students may petition to fulfill an elective requirement with a course that examines specific regions or populations relating to the location of their field experience or their career interests. Students are encouraged to study regional languages that they may use during their field experiences, but language courses cannot fulfill an elective requirement for the minor.

To petition for a course to count toward Category V, please submit an Elective Petition Form, found on the program website.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the Global Health Minor, students are able to:

• Analyze global health problems, issues and controversies using multiple disciplinary perspectives and conceptual frameworks,
• Integrate knowledge from academic study and experiential learning toward being active and informed citizens in a global community,
  
• Demonstrate the capacity to critically reflect on one's own values, ethics, assumptions and actions in the context of cultures, collaborations and institutions,
  
• Demonstrate the capacity to collaborate across differences (e.g. cultural, social, personal, economic, values, religious).