Courses - Undergraduate

The Institute has developed a series of undergraduate courses on the topics of sustainability and energy, with an expected audience spanning the whole university, from physical sciences and engineering to social science, business, communication, and law.

Note: ISEN 210, 220, and 230 are all required for the Undergraduate Certificate in Sustainability and Energy.

ISEN 210 Introduction to Sustainability: Challenges and Solutions

Course Overview: This course introduces core analysis principles for understanding and assessing sustainability and improvement pathways, with a particular emphasis on life-cycle thinking for holistic sustainability analysis. Students will learn about major challenges for achieving more sustainable societies through the lenses of different overarching analysis principles, including life-cycle analysis, technology stock modeling, cost analysis, and considerations of time, location, and development when assessing opportunities for societal change. These principles will be applied in homework assignments and the course project to develop basic quantitative insights into societal challenges related to energy and resource use, consumption and development, and environmental damages. These analytical perspectives will be employed by students to develop an understanding of potential solution pathways, including technology deployment, behavioral and societal changes, and policies, standards, and regulations as well as the human, institutional, and political barriers to these pathways.

Instructor: Udayan Singh
Offered: Winter/Spring (TBD) 2024

ISEN 220 Introduction to Energy Systems for the 21st Century

Course Overview: This survey course provides an overview of energy issues in the context of global sustainability. Energy demands for transportation, residential, and commercial uses are presented, and strategies for demand reduction are discussed. Major potential sustainable energy sources will be presented, including solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, biofuels, waves and tides, along with coal, nuclear, and hydraulic fracturing technologies. Issues associated with carbon capture, energy storage, and the power grid will be discussed. While this course will address many technical and scientific aspects of energy, no prerequisite technical courses are required.

Instructor: Yip-Wah Chung
Offered: Winter 2024

ISEN 230 Climate Change and Sustainability: Ethical Dimensions

Course Overview: What are our ethical responsibilities in the face of anthropogenic climate change? The course begins with an exploration of how far reaching our ethical responsibilities are. After some introduction to philosophical ethics and the science of climate change, we will question which things matter morally: are future-human beings, non-human animals, and ecosystems morally important? How do they compare morally to humans alive today? In the second half of the course we will focus on how individually specific our ethical responsibilities are. We will focus on a range of common behaviors relevant to climate change and ask whether we can ethically justify our individual participation in these behaviors. We will conclude the course by asking whether there are any behaviors that we might have a moral responsibility to personally adopt in response to climate change.

Instructors: Chad Horne
Offered: Spring 2024

ISEN 390 Thermal Energy Systems Design (Cross-listed as MECH_ENG 380)

Course Overview: Applications of the principles of energy engineering analysis to the design of thermal systems. Consideration of such systems as air conditioning, oil piping, refrigeration, fluid distribution, and pneumatic control. Projects will be tailored to the class. Solution of open-ended design problems including introduction to EES (Engineering Equation Solver) software that has built-in thermophysical properties.

Instructors: Manohar Kulkarni
Offered: Spring 2024