Student Spotlight – Maria Sperduto

Maria Sperduto began her studies in social and behavioral sciences to explore mechanisms surrounding social connectedness, particularly how it relates to the way people engage with social issues. Maria’s focus is intervention development, and she is interested in compassion-related behaviors like perspective-taking, communicating across difference, and acting to support the wellbeing of others. Maria says that we often think of mindfulness and emotional intelligence as practices that are beneficial to individual wellbeing, but the social effects are also profound. “Research shows that building these skills benefits social functioning, communication skills and feeling connected. They are skill-based, learnable and can transform the way we respond to our own needs and those of others.”

As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Maria launched a campus initiative to help students optimize performance and wellbeing through mindfulness. Its success led the college to create a position for her upon graduation, and she became Dartmouth’s first wellness program coordinator. Maria and her colleagues launched the Student Wellness Center, where she taught mindfulness classes and implemented evidence-based practices for supporting health behavior change and wellbeing. There she began collaborating with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI) to merge their tools into an experience for an undergraduate audience.

Two years later, Maria arrived at the Yale School of Public health to continue her work with YCEI while expanding her skillset around analysis of social factors in health. This summer as program developer of the “EI Accelerator,” she executed pilot tests of the app-based, four-week experience for college students. She is preparing the program for inclusion in a comparative study this fall.

As a second-year student at the Yale School of Public Health, Maria’s wellbeing work continues. She teaches Koru Mindfulness classes to undergraduates through Yale Wellness, and will teach an EI intervention in “Social and Behavioral Foundations of Health,” a required class for public health students. Maria is a research assistant at the Social Gerontology and Health Lab, where she observes conversations of older adult couples and analyses relationship qualities. She also remains a perpetual student with meditation teachers who help nourish her own practice of living meditation.