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Browse Academic Possibilities

At Northwestern, learning happens in myraid ways, with professors, peers, and spaces all contributing to a rich environment that supports deep dives and interdisciplinary approaches. Select an academic area below for a sample of how these elements might intersect.

Guillermo Ameer

Faculty Spotlight

Dr. Guillermo Ameer is the Daniel Hale Williams professor of Biomedical Engineering and Surgery in the Biomedical Engineering Department at the McCormick School of Engineering and the Department of Surgery at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. He is the founding director of the Center for Advanced Regenerative Engineering (CARE). Dr. Ameer received his Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and his doctoral degree in Chemical and Biomedical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Class Spotlight

Design Thinking and Communication (DTC) is Segal’s two-quarter, foundational design course, serving students from all engineering majors. In DTC's first quarter, most projects involve solving problems for people with special needs, such as rehabilitation. In the second quarter, projects address a variety of problems like healthcare, industry, and education. DTC is team-taught by faculty from McCormick and Northwestern’s Writing Program. DTC is listed under both Design and English and emphasizes the role that communication plays in team and client settings.

Design Thinking project team
Lunt Hall

Building Spotlight

Lunt Hall (1894) served as Northwestern's library until Deering Library was built in 1933. Designed by William Augustus Otis, the Italian Renaissance-style building was funded largely by a gift from Orrington Lunt, a prominent Chicago businessman and one of Northwestern's founders. While little of the building's original splendor has survived remodeling efforts, the main entrance foyer and the woodwork on the ceiling of the first-floor library offer a glimpse of the craftsmanship involved in its construction. Lunt Hall served as Northwestern's administration building from 1933 to 1942. During World War II the Naval Training School for radio operators occupied the building. Today Lunt Hall is the third-oldest building on campus and houses the mathematics department.

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Melissa Foster

Faculty Spotlight

Melissa Foster is an educator, voice specialist, theatre artist, researcher, and speaker. As a voice teacher, she specializes in musical theatre, pop styles, the history and performance of hip-hop, and opera/musical theatre crossover. Her scholarly book project, The Scenario: Hip-Hop History and Performance Techniques for Musical Theatre, examines the pathway into hip-hop performance with historical and cultural awareness, vocal health, and authenticity. She is also working on a project titled “The Message,” which discusses hip-hop’s history and its profound influence on contemporary pop culture.

Class Spotlight

ART 220 Introduction to Painting: Introduction to problems in oil painting and visual thinking. Includes surface preparation, color mixing, and composition. No previous experience necessary.

oil paint and brush
Shirley W. Ryan Center

Building Spotlight

The Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Center for the Musical Arts is the home of the Bienen School of Music and the theater and performance studies departments in the School of Communication. The building, opened in 2015, includes classrooms, teaching labs, academic faculty offices, teaching studios, practice rooms, student lounges and administrative offices. The Ryan Center also houses the Mary B. Galvin Recital Hall, the David and Carol McClintock Choral and Recital Room, and the Shirley Welsh Ryan Opera Theater.

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Mark Witte

Faculty Spotlight

Mark Witte's research deals with applied questions in macroeconomics and public finance. His main interests are in consumption theory and topics in taxation. His teaching interests include macroeconomics, money and banking, public finance, and the economics of the environment and the extraction of natural resources. He has been voted onto the Associated Student Government honor roll numerous times in recognition of both his teaching and student advising. He has been honored with a Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences (WCAS) Distinguished Teaching Award, and a WCAS Distinguished Leader in the Undergraduate Community Award.

Class Spotlight

BUS_INST 321 Business and Economic Institutions in Historical Perspective: Factors affecting economic growth and challenges that economies face to achieve economic success. The organization of firms and financial markets, corporate governance, innovation, financial crises, income inequality, race and gender.

financial growth chart
Global hub

Building Spotlight

The Kellogg Global Hub is an innovative 415,000-square-foot building on the Evanston campus that houses the Economics department in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, along with the Kellogg School of Management.

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Haoqi Zhang

Faculty Spotlight

Haoqi Zhang is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in Electrical Computer Engineering and and at the Segal Design Institute. He is currently the Junior Breed Professor of Design. Zhang directs the Design, Technology, and Research (DTR) program and co-directs the Delta Lab at Northwestern

He studies, designs, and builds social computing systems that promote desired behaviors and outcomes. His current work focuses on engaging crowds and communities in problem-solving and collective action, and on advancing new data-driven design processes.

Class Spotlight

COMP_SCI 376 Game Design and Development: Fundamental concepts of software for computer games and other simulation-based media. Topics will include game design (selecting rules, resources, and player objectives), 2D and 3D game programming, representation of space, physics and collision detection, 3D animation engines, and performance engineering issues for real-time rendering.

3d gaming
The Technological Institute

Building Spotlight

The Technological Institute (1942) has more than 750,000 square feet of classrooms, offices, laboratories, and research facilities. Designed by Holabird and Root, the facility is one of the largest academic buildings in the world. It houses the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science as well as the departments of chemistry and of physics and astronomy, which are part of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The Lannon stone and Bedford limestone building is embellished at the entrance by Edgar Miller's sculptural reliefs on scientific and engineering themes.

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Michelle N. Huang

Faculty Spotlight

Michelle N. Huang (she/her/hers) Ph.D. English and Women’s Studies, Pennsylvania State University), jointly appointed in the English Department and in the Asian American Studies Program, has research and teaching interests in contemporary Asian American literature, posthumanism, and feminist science studies.

Her current project, “Molecular Race,” examines posthumanist aesthetics in post-1965 Asian American literature to trace racial representation and epistemology at nonhuman, minute scales. “Molecular Race” argues that a rapprochement with scientific discourse is necessary to fully grasp how the formal and aesthetic qualities of Asian American literature unsettle sedimented structures of racial formation. Photo credit: C.A. Davis

Class Spotlight

COMM_ST 205 Theories of Persuasion: This course provides a general introduction to social-scientific research concerning persuasive communication. The course focuses on alternative theoretical accounts of the processes underlying persuasion and on research findings concerning the effects of various factors on persuasive effectiveness.

person using a megaphone on a colorful decorative cutout paper background
university hall

Building Spotlight

University Hall (1869) is the oldest building on campus. It was designed by Gurdon P. Randall and took three years to construct. The high-Victorian Gothic building was made with the same type of Joliet limestone that was used in the historic Chicago Water Tower. Now the home of the English department, it originally housed a chapel, a museum, classrooms, a library, and meeting rooms. The clock in University Hall's highest tower, with a movement built by Seth Thomas, was the gift of the class of 1879. The bells were the gift of the class of 1880.

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Geraldo L. Cadava

Faculty Spotlight

Geraldo L. Cadava (Ph.D., Yale University, 2008) is a historian of the United States and Latin America. He focuses on Latinos in the United States and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Originally from Tucson, Arizona, he came to Northwestern after finishing degrees at Yale University (Ph.D., 2008) and Dartmouth College (B.A., 2000). He is the author of two books.

Cadava teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Latino History, the American West, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, migration to and from Latin America, and other topics in U.S. History, including Watergate, the musical Hamilton, and the 2016 and 2020 elections. He is also the Director of the Latina and Latino Studies Program.

Class Spotlight

ITALIAN 275 Dante's Divine Comedy: Refashioning the conventions of poetry, Dante (1265-1321) used the account of his presumed journey through the three realms of the Christian afterlife - Hell, Purgatory and Paradise - to explore the world at the close of the Middle Ages. The poem is both an adventure story and an exhaustive, assessment of the state of politics, society, religion, literature, philosophy, and theology at the beginning of the fourteenth century. This course examines a selection of cantos Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio in its cultural, social and political context. In particular we will explore how the underground world imagined by the poet relates to late medieval urban life and culture. A guiding concern of the discussion is to assess the ways in which Dante changed our understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine, justice and love, will and reason, happiness and knowledge, literature and the Bible. Political turmoil, philosophical and theological paradigms social and religious conflict all converge in the making of Inferno and Purgatorio and will thus form crucial elements of our investigation. Taught in English.

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Kresge

Building Spotlight

Kresge Centennial Hall (1955) was built to commemorate Northwestern's 100th anniversary and named for the Kresge Foundation (which gave $500,000 of the $2.4 million cost of the building). Designed by Holabird & Root, it today houses the programs in comparative literary studies, art theory and practice, art history, and foreign languages. A four-story addition designed by DeStefano and Partners (2002) was built on the south side of Kresge Hall to provide additional faculty office space.

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Patty Loew

Faculty Spotlight

Patty Loew is a professor at Medill and director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern. A member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Loew is a former broadcast journalist in public and commercial television. She is the author of Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal, now in its second edition, which won the Wisconsin Library Association's 2002 Outstanding Book Award; Native People of Wisconsin, also newly revised and expanded, which is used by 20,000 Wisconsin school children as a social studies text; and Teachers Guide to Native People of Wisconsin. Her latest book, Seventh Generation Earth Ethics, won the 2014 Midwest Book Award for Culture.

Class Spotlight

RTVF 325 Film, Media & Gender: Feminist media scholars have celebrated the unruly woman as a figure who uses humor and excess to challenge patriarchal norms and authority, figures such as Mae West, Lucille Ball, and Roseanne, among many others. This class considers classic and contemporary unruly woman and the limits of unruliness; we consider who gets to be unruly (and when and where), and the relationship between unruliness and female stereotypes.

Lucille Ball
Football with headphones

Class Spotlight

JOUR 357 Sports Commentary: The goal for each student in this course is to develop a distinctive voice that stands out from the cacophony of opinions in the sporting world, to create commentary that is informative, thought-provoking and entertaining and to adapt those messages for delivery across multiple media platforms:  the written word, television, radio, podcasts and social media. Students will learn to coalesce their observations, opinions and experiences into compelling arguments.

McCormick Foundation Center

Building Spotlight

The McCormick Foundation Center (2002) houses state-of-the-art broadcast, multimedia, and new media facilities. The four-story, 47,000-square-foot structure was designed by Einhorn Yaffee Prescott.

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Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy

Faculty Spotlight

Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy is an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and a Soretta and Henry Shapiro Research Professor of Molecular Biology. Her lab focuses on two broad, inter-related themes: decoding neuromodulation and neural circuit design principles. It seeks to address the following questions: What activity-dependent rules govern the design of neural circuits and synapses in early life? How are these rules updated by experience and broken in disease? What is the function of neuromodulation during development and in behavior? How do multiplexed neuromodulatory systems operate?

Class Spotlight

BIOL_SCI 327 Biology of Aging: In this course we will discuss the current molecular and cellular processes that contribute to organismal aging. Topics will include but are not limited to: epigenetic changes, mitochondrial dysfunction, loss of proteostasis and nutrient sensing pathways. Through critical analysis of current primary literature, students will gain an understanding of how experimental evidence informs the current biological theories of aging. Furthermore, we will explore the biological and ethical considerations of extending lifespan and current studies on the potential to reverse aging. Through a mix of lectures, discussions, and primary literature review, we will explore the molecular and cellular biology of aging. Discussions will be based on recent literature and will provide students with some of the current knowledge in this growing field of study. We will also critically analyze media portrayal of lifespan extension and its implications in human biology.

cells dividing
The Technological Institute

Building Spotlight

The Technological Institute (1942) has more than 750,000 square feet of classrooms, offices, laboratories, and research facilities. Designed by Holabird and Root, the facility is one of the largest academic buildings in the world. It houses the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science as well as the departments of chemistry and of physics and astronomy, which are part of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The Lannon stone and Bedford limestone building is embellished at the entrance by Edgar Miller's sculptural reliefs on scientific and engineering themes.

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Choose from more than 4,000 courses.

Your options are immense. Browse course descriptions from all Northwestern schools to begin charting your academic path.