As the world faces increasingly complex issues, including emerging diseases, the effects of climate change, food insecurity, and antimicrobial resistance, solving health challenges increasingly requires collaboration from multiple health fields. As part of MSU Global Health Studies’ new course offerings for Fall 2026, OST 452: Introduction to One Health, aims to show the importance of these collaborative approaches.
OST 452: Introduction to One Health introduces students to the interconnected relationships between human, animal and environmental health and how those connections can lead to improvements in addressing global health challenges. The course, developed by MSU Department of Entomology and Department of Osteopathic Medical Specialties professor Dr. M. Eric Benbow, the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources’ Dr. Ramjee Ghimire and Dr. Pratima Devkota, and MSU James Madison College’s Dr. Sejuti Das Gupta, will use real-world case studies, group projects and discussion-based learning methods to examine how health issues emerge and can be solved through collaboration among experts in multiple fields.
"The type of student this course is for is going to be any student interested in how their primary discipline of interest, whether that's medicine or agriculture or entomology, fits into broader relationships with and among human, animal, and environmental health," said M. Eric Benbow, professor in the Department of Entomology and Department of Osteopathic Medical Specialties and one of the course’s designers.
Being the first One Health course offered at Michigan State University, Introduction to One Health offers students a unique and timely opportunity to be taught by a team of professors from multiple disciplines, ranging from environmental health and agriculture to public policy and health equity. Through the diverse teaching structure, students will be able to see uniquely diverse ways of thinking when talking about the same health issues, and how each of the professors’ fields of study interact with one another in the real world. Furthermore, Introduction to One Health exemplifies MSU’s larger commitment to its One Team, One Health Initiative, which encourages a more integrated research approach among all university health programs.
"We're coming together as a multidisciplinary team to address these more complex problems," Benbow said. "That's where this introduction to One Health really begins."
Throughout the course, students will explore topics such as zoonotic diseases, ecological biodiversity, climate change, food safety, toxicology, and global health governance, along with how each of those different fields is connected to the others.
One example the course uses to show this multi-disciplinary connection is through the topic of antimicrobial resistance, where the overuse of antibiotics in human medicine and livestock production can have an impact on environmental systems and bacterial antibiotic resistance.
"We're going to take a couple of systems like that and demonstrate to the student how multiple disciplines are important for understanding and managing these much more complex problems of humanity right now," Benbow said.
While Introduction to One Health offers a strong scientific and technical focus, the course also explores social topics such as health equity, ethics, policy, governance and access to care. Including these topics, Dr. Benbow says, shows how deeply health concerns can impact communities through a human-centric lens.
"What I think is really unique about this course is that the students are going to get a really good foundation in the science behind human-animal environmental health. But we're going to do it also within this human dimensions framework," he said.
Another distinguishing feature of the course is its emphasis on collaboration. Rather than relying solely on traditional lectures, the course is designed around discussions and interdisciplinary case studies that mirror how One Health professionals work in practice. Students from different academic backgrounds will work together to analyze complex health issues and develop solutions.
"The rationale behind that is that's how One Health works," Benbow said. "Students will likely be assigned in a way that they have different majors in a group. So they have different depths of expertise in certain topics."
Those collaborative skills between different disciplines, Benbow notes, are becoming increasingly valuable regardless of students’ career paths.
"I think their ability to read, listen to and digest material that is outside of their focus, and they're going to learn how to integrate that new knowledge and see the connections… We can all get on Google and use AI to find a whole bunch of information real fast, right? But if you can't appropriately evaluate it, or integrate it, then it's going to be meaningless. It's going to be knowledge without context.”
For Dr. Benbow, the most exciting part about teaching this new course is to be able to pass down the communication and health collaboration skills he developed throughout his career.
"One Health is really about bringing those people together and everyone listening and being respectful," he said. "What I'm really excited about with this course is I get to provide that 20 years of training."
OST 452: Introduction to One Health is open to all undergraduate MSU students and available starting in the Fall 2026 semester.