From Psychology to Practice: Understanding the Impact of Our Environments with Diya Ramesh

Hi! My name is Diya Ramesh, and I am a junior from Voorhees, NJ majoring in Business Administration through Kenan-Flagler and Psychology (B.S.). For the Fall 2026 semester, I am interning at A Lotta Love, a nonprofit organization that uses trauma-informed design principles to improve transitional housing environments and create spaces that better support individuals and families experiencing homelessness.

My interest in psychology began in middle school, when I became attuned to the ways mental health can affect people's everyday lives. I designed and fundraised for a wellness center, called Cloud Nine, at my school, hoping to create a space where students could access resources and feel supported. Although the project was ultimately interrupted by COVID-19, the experience introduced me to the broader challenges surrounding mental health and sparked my interest in understanding how systems can influence people's well-being.

As I continued exploring psychology, my interests eventually moved toward the intersection of psychology and business. Through my business coursework in college, I discovered industrial-organizational psychology and became fascinated by the ways psychological principles can be applied to workplace and organizational challenges. I became particularly interested in understanding how organizations can better support their people, improve team effectiveness, and use research to solve complex organizational problems. Studying Business Administration and Psychology together has allowed me to explore these questions from both a behavioral and organizational perspective.

My interest in research has grown alongside my academic work. As a research assistant in the Kenan-Flagler Organizational Behavior Lab, I have supported faculty research projects across multiple universities, conducted literature reviews, and helped code and analyze survey data. My research experiences have introduced me to topics including workplace relationships, ethics, communication, and organizational decision-making. These experiences taught me how much can be learned from both quantitative data and the experiences behind that data, which has become especially relevant to my work this semester.

These interests led me to pursue the Karen M. Gil Internship with A Lotta Love. Working with my manager, Tina Clossick, I am exploring trauma-informed design, environmental psychology, and homelessness while helping think through how A Lotta Love can evaluate the impact of its work in transitional housing. One of my first projects has been reviewing the organization's first research study and conducting a literature review to better understand the existing research surrounding trauma-informed environments. I have also had the opportunity to speak with A Lotta Love stakeholders and researchers involved in the original study, which has helped me understand aspects of the research process that cannot always be captured in a published paper.

One of the most interesting parts of this experience has been learning about the challenges of conducting research in real-world environments. The original study provided valuable insights into how trauma-informed design may affect residents' experiences of safety, comfort, connection, and choice. However, evaluating these experiences within transitional housing comes with unique challenges. Residents may have different levels of comfort with participating in research, and shelter staff have limited time and resources. Through my conversations with stakeholders, I am learning how important it is for an evaluation to be both detailed enough to produce information and practical enough to fit into the environment of implementation. 

As the semester progresses, I will use the stakeholder interviews and the literature review to help develop a new trauma-informed evaluation toolkit and an implementation plan. 

This internship has given me the opportunity to return to a question that first interested me back in middle school: how can we create environments that better support people's well-being? While my interests have since expanded from mental health into organizational and behavioral psychology, this experience has reminded me that people and their environments are connected. 

I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to participate in the Karen M. Gil Internship Program and to work alongside the A Lotta Love team this semester. I am especially thankful to Tina Clossick and the many stakeholders and researchers who have taken the time to share their perspectives with me. I am also grateful to Dr. Steven Buzinski and Richie Gray for making this opportunity possible and for their continued support. I am looking forward to continuing this work throughout the semester and seeing how the research and shelter engagement come together to shape recommendations for a second phase of evaluation.