As the inaugural H3 Interdisciplinary Scholars, Ryan Haymore and Nagasriya Ramisetty each developed their own unique ways to unite their studies in the humanities and health.
Ramisetty is a double major in Applied Humanities, with an emphasis in Public Health, and Physiology and Medical Sciences, with minors in Adolescents, Community, and Education (ACE) and Creative Writing. Haymore is majoring in Spanish & Portuguese, with a minor in Biochemistry. Both are honors students and both are working toward medical school.
As the first two students selected for the Health Humanities Hub Interdisciplinary Scholars program, they demonstrate how readily new collaborations at the intersection of health and humanities can be created.
“It was fascinating to see how they each brought their own experiences, strengths, and academic perspectives to bear. At a campus wellness event, Ryan used his language skills to converse with visitors in Portugues, and Sriya used her artistic talent to create a beautiful scaffold for a collective poem. They embody the wide variety of possibilities within the health humanities, from the linguistic and cultural aspects of healthcare to the role of creative expression in studying and supporting well-being,” said H3 Coordinator Christine Hoekenga.
Ramisetty, a Flinn scholar from the Phoenix area, came into college as a pre-medicine student studying physiology, but soon added the Applied Humanities major since it fit her interest in narrative medicine and the changing healthcare environment.
“This is the perfect crucible for me to combine all my interests. It perfectly synthesizes why I think the humanities lend themselves to better health practices and how the humanities can be healing,” she said.
Haymore chose his major knowing that with a diversifying patient population, the intercultural skills from the humanities would be increasingly important, and would also make him stand out when applying to medical school.
“I always wanted to do something other than a science major, to use the undergraduate opportunity to become more well-rounded. I already knew Spanish somewhat fluently and I wanted to continue learning languages, so that was my introduction to the humanities. I love the history, the art, the music, all those other things that go into learning about the culture and language,” said Haymore, who was drawn to the internship in an email list of opportunities. “As soon as I saw health and humanities in the same phrase, I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do.”
Together, Haymore and Ramisetty conducted a research project on social prescribing, a promising healthcare approach that connects patients to community organizations to address social determinants of health. There are a variety of activities and organizations, but common areas of focus include nature, exercise and art.
They reviewed recent research, analyzing dozens of programs to understand the variety of models and created a general diagram of how social prescribing works. Because most of the case studies are in Europe, Australia and Canada, they examined different health care systems and economic structures. They also identified gaps in the literature, opportunities for future research, and potential limitations for social prescribing to gain more momentum in U.S. They presented their research at the Franke Honors Pinnacle in April.
“One thing they did that’s impressive and different was to go beyond the academic literature and spend time looking at toolkits and action plans created by community organizations outside academia,” Hoekenga said. “It’s a research project with a very applied component.”
Separately, Ramisetty presented an independent research project, which she also presented at the Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association in March. The work in progress is a literature review of different components of Asian American mental health stigma, analyzing how individuals experience it vs. how the community perceives it and how that is integrated into policy. Next, Ramisetty will conduct interviews for patient narratives as she expands the research into her honors thesis project.
Haymore, who lived in Argentina before college, completed his honors thesis his junior year, examining connections between language learning and well-being, reviewing literature on how cognitive decline can be prevented by learning another language. He presented his thesis in both English and Spanish. He will graduate after the fall semester and has received early acceptance to the College of Medicine – Tucson.
Throughout the semester, the scholars also served as ambassadors for the health humanities. Haymore represented H3 alongside faculty and students from the Center for Digital Humanities at a Fuel Wonder event in February in Scottsdale, showcasing a variety of health-humanities collaborations. Both scholars participated in the Be-Leaf and Bloom event hosted by Campus Health in April, creating a Poe-Tree, an exercise encouraging people to write their own mini-poems about where they are from, to demonstrate how people’s experiences can be linked to social determinants of health. Ramisetty is creating a digital art piece to showcase the results.
Brimming with more ideas than they can tackle in a semester, Haymore and Ramisetty, along with fellow H3 intern Taylor Raney, are also developing a framework for increased student engagement in the Health Humanities Hub, potentially a club or ambassador program to enable ongoing and larger scale activities.