JANHAWI KELKAR & MARDELLE McCUSKEY SHEPLEY How did you find one another? Janhawi Kelkar ’17: I’m majoring in Human Biology, Health, and Society, so before starting research with Dr. Shepley, my interests were mostly in disease and epidemiology. I was working in a different lab during the fall semester of my sophomore year, but I didn’t feel very inspired. Then one of my friends told me about the Health Design Innovations Lab. He had a teaching assistant who was trying to decide between design school and medical school, just like me, and she introduced me to Dr. Shepley.
Mardelle McCuskey Shepley, Professor of Design and Environmental Analysis and Associate Director of the Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures: That’s about how I remember it, too. Janhawi had some of the standard, pre-med background, but with a really strong interest in the impact of the physical environment.
Kelkar: I’ve always loved art, but I didn’t realize that art and health could come together in such a scientific way, that there was a major part of DEA that studies health care design. That we could do this research focusing on environmental features— like daylight, for example, or gardens—that influence health and recovery.
What are we going to learn from these studies? Shepley: We’re hoping to find information about the impact of the physical environment in psychiatric facilities, which will help designers produce environments that are more conducive to healing. When we ask health care providers whether
natural light is important, they say, “It’s extremely important.” But when we ask how much light they have in their patient areas, they might say, “Hardly any.”
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“Janhawi was just a sophomore, and she jumped into this and started doing the work of a graduate student.”
Kelkar: We’re finding these holes, gaps between what designers define as important features and what psychiatric facilities are currently providing. It’s really exciting.
What’s the latest thing you learned? Kelkar: This past semester, we were doing a lot of data analysis, so I learned how to use some statistical analysis programs, how to read the scientific literature, how to write articles for publication. I still can’t believe that I get to study art and health care side by side, and I’m really surprised by how much influence design can have on recovery.
Shepley: Janhawi was just a sophomore, and she jumped into this and started doing the work of a graduate student. It was action learning. But she’s a natural researcher—it’s in the nature of how she operates in the world.
Isn’t it hard to do graduate level work when you’re a secondsemester sophomore? Kelkar: If you enjoy it, it doesn’t feel like work. I’m really passionate about this research, so I really enjoy the time I spend on it. It’s fun. Outside the lab, Janhawi Kelkar volunteers with the community service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega.
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HUMAN ECOLOGY 29