Humans, especially we older ones, are obsessed with good health and longevity, and we are willing to pay for it. As a nation, Americans spend 17% of their incomes on health care, and that share has generally been rising above and beyond what one would expect based on aging of the population alone. In an era when the longevity gap between rich and poor may be widening, we are keenly interested in understanding and preventing health inequalities by improving the health of the disadvantaged. But what external elements and human behaviors produce good health? What kinds of influences reduce health? Is there a difference between activities that we observe healthy people engaging in and activities that actually improve health? The gold standard for disentangling cause and effect in medicine is the randomized controlled trial. But we suspect that many social and behavioral phenomena are important for population health but are never administered in specific dosages to randomly selected treatment and control groups. In this first year connector course, we will examine and discuss measures of human health and longevity alongside arrays of measurable influences on health, identifying the key questions traditionally addressed in health sciences and exploring the current frontier. We will develop broad knowledge of the metrics, methods, and challenges, and we will apply them toward understanding of current issues in health policy.