Hannah Peterson ’27 (CAHNR), a master’s student in the Department of Allied Health Sciences, is spending her summer contributing to research at the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at Harvard University.

The Center focuses on social wellbeing as a significant factor in health promotion.

“This internship opportunity is the cream of the crop when it comes to looking at social wellbeing, which is a metric of health promotion that I’m really interested in,” Peterson says. “It was a really exciting opportunity to work with multiple scholars that are looking at things like social health and civic engagement and those topics that I really enjoy.”

Peterson has been working with Shoba Ramanadhan, an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard, to assess youth access to physical activity in Lawrence, Mass. They are collaborating with the non-profit organization Everyone’s a Player.

“We found ourselves working with a ton of different people,” Peterson says. “Everyone’s got this really great common goal of just getting kids better access and utilization of sports and active lifestyles.”

Peterson has helped develop interview guides for researchers, including herself, to use when they are talking to parents, youth, coaches, and community organizers. During the summer she also began the interview process with parents in Lawrence.

For Peterson, who wants to continue her learning and research in a PhD program, this internship gave her the opportunity to meet many of her academic heroes.

“It has been a networking dream to just meet some of my ‘academic celebrities,’” Peterson says. “Genuinely people that are at the top of my field and really creating knowledge in these new spaces. So, it’s been really exciting to meet them.”

This summer, Peterson, whose work at UConn focuses on political determinants of health, has been able to meet people working in other facets of her field.

“People are all over the map in terms of what they study,” Peterson says.” But ultimately, all of us are able to have a conversation about public health at the end of the day. It’s really cool to be able to see the breadth of my field and understand that it all comes down to the same goal.”

Peterson also conducted a literature review on existing data on this topic.

At UConn, Peterson has conducted research on civic engagement in Latino adults in the U.S., which helped her understand the population she worked with this summer. Lawrence’s population is 83.2% Latino as of 2025.

“I really came into this experience knowing the population that I was working with in terms of their habits of community engagement, and it kind of gave me a leg up to already know the literature that I was walking into and just having to transfer it to the youth population,” Peterson says.

Peterson had previously worked on studies using quantitative methods. This summer internship has given her experience in qualitative research as well.

“This was a really nice precursor to walk into this internship and learn more about the concrete methods,” Peterson says.

Peterson says her previous experience publishing an article with her UConn advisor, Assistant Professor Anna-Michelle McSorley on how U.S. immigration policies impact Latino maternal and child health, helped her understand the expectations for her internship.

“Working in that publication space at UConn this past year, it definitely helped to know kind of the role that you play as a graduate student in the publication process,” Peterson says.

This work relates to CAHNR’s Strategic Vision area focused on Enhancing Health and Well-Being Locally, Nationally, and Globally.

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