Global Public & Environmental Health Minor

Colgate’s Global Public and Environmental Health Program helps students to understand interdisciplinary perspectives on critical health issues and the skills needed to address them, both locally and on a global scale. Students in public health learn to think critically, speak, and write clearly and articulately about health issues from a variety of perspectives. The global public health curriculum combines interdisciplinary breadth with depth in a chosen field of study.

The Global Public and Environmental Health Program is an interdisciplinary program located within the Division of University Studies and staffed by faculty from the four academic divisions who apply their knowledge and expertise to teaching and research endeavors that cross disciplinary boundaries. The program administers a minor that includes a common introductory course to ensure a common interdisciplinary experience. Students achieve depth in analytical ability by taking a set of courses chosen in consultation with their adviser. To fulfill the global public and environmental health minor graduation requirements, students must possess a minimum overall GPA of at least 2.00 in all courses counted toward the minor, both the introductory course and those taken in other departments and programs.

Minor Requirements

The minor consists of six courses. Courses cannot be double counted within the minor. Only one of the five elective courses for the minor can be at the 100-level. See Colgate course catalog for course descriptions.

Required Course (New in Fall '21)

GPEH 100 - Introduction to Global Public and Environmental Health

The overall purpose of this course is to introduce students to critical global health issues and ways to address or solve them. The curriculum focuses on the following global health topics: infectious and chronic diseases, maternal/child health, immigrant and refugee health, the relationship between political and cultural processes and health, factors contributing to disparate health outcomes in population groups and how to measure those outcomes. The course is divided into two parts. The first emphasizes the distribution and determinants of disease causation in global contexts utilizing skills and methods in the discipline of global health. The second examines some of the most pressing contemporary global health concerns and contextualizes those concerns in cross-cultural and historical knowledge.

One course on Methodological Perspectives - choose from list

ANTH 211 - Investigating Contemporary Culture
BIOL 310 - Epidemiology
BIOL 316 - Bioinformatics
BIOL 320 - Biostatistics
CORE 143S - Introduction to Statistics
ENST 250 - Environmental Policy Analysis
GEOG 245 - Geographic Information Systems
GEOG 250 - Research Methods
PSYC 309 - Quantitative Methods in Behavioral Research
SOCI 250 - Sociological Research Design and Methods

One course from at least three of the four disciplinary groups (Scientific, Environmental, Social, Humanities)

Scientific Perspectives

BIOL 101 - Global Climate Change and You
BIOL 301 - Parasitology and
BIOL 313 - Microbiology and BIOL 313L
BIOL 318 - Vertebrate Physiology and BIOL 318L
BIOL 330 - Conservation Biology
BIOL 336 - Advanced Ecology
BIOL 337 - Cancer Biology
BIOL 359 - Ecosystem Ecology and BIOL 359L
BIOL 373 - Virology and BIOL 373L
BIOL 374 - Immunology
CORE 128S - Global Change and You
CORE 172S - The Biology of Women: Sex, Gender, Reproduction, and Disease
CORE 177S - Critical Analysis of Health Issues

Environmental Perspectives

BIOL 330 - Conservation Biology
BIOL 336 - Advanced Ecology
BIOL 359 - Ecosystem Ecology and BIOL 359L
CORE 128S - Global Change and You
ENST 233 - Global Environmental Health Issues
ENST 390 - Community-based Study of Environmental Issues
GEOG 316 - Environmental and Public Health Geographies
GEOG 319 - Population and Environment
GEOG 321 - Gender, Justice, and Environmental Change
GEOL 101 - Environmental Geology
GEOL 102 - Sustainable Earth

Social Perspectives

ALST 351 - Medicine, Health and Healing in Africa
ANTH 102 - Culture, Diversity and Inequality
ANTH 222 - Medical Anthropology
ANTH 226 Critical Global Health
ANTH 244 - Who Owns Culture?
ANTH/SOCI 245 - Nature, Culture, Politics
ANTH 334 - Public Health in Africa
ECON 348 - Health Economics
POSC 361 - Humanitarian Interventions
PSYC 363 - Developmental Psychopathology
PSYC 365 - Cross-Cultural Human Development
RELG 252 - Religion, Plagues, Pandemics
SOCI 212 Power, Racism and Privilege
SOCI 310 - Sociology of the Body
SOCI 312 - Social Inequality
SOC 325 Mental Illness

Humanities Perspectives

ARTS 260 - Social Practice Art
HIST 210 - The History of Health, Disease and Empire (TR)
LGBT 340 - Rural Sexualities and Genders
PHIL 214 - Medical Ethics
RELG 265 - Global Bioethics and Religion