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Hannah Rickert is a senior at the University of Rochester who experiences chronic migraines. She is also a winner of the first-ever AbbVie Migraine Career Catalyst Award contest, which awarded 20 individuals up to $2,500 to help support their career aspirations.
To Rickert, the award represents an acknowledgement of her identity, one that can be hard to see.
“This really feels like, ‘Hey, we see you. You’re not invisible even if your disability is,’” says Rickert.
The award winners were selected based on short essay, video, and audio clip submissions highlighting their experiences living with migraine, their career aspirations, and how the award could help support their future success.
Approximately 12 percent of the U.S. population, or 40 million people, reports having migraines. Chronic migraines, where an individual has more than 15 headache days per month, affects about 3 to 5 percent of the population.
Often, migraines have common triggers, but no single cause, making them difficult to diagnose. Triggers include hormonal shifts, allergies, family history, anxiety, stress, lack of sleep, head or neck injuries, or other environmental causes. Rickert says her Apple watch sometimes alerts her to a spike in blood pressure, which is typically linked to an oncoming attack.
Migraines come with many different strains, risk factors, symptoms and alleviations. With each case being so unique, Rickert was only formally diagnosed in her sophomore year of college, a benefit of being close to the UR Medical Center.
She does remember noticing her headaches were different as early as first grade.
“We were doing an alliteration project and my name starts with H, so I came up with: ‘Hannah has horrible headaches,’” she recalls. “Everyone else in my class had these very silly type descriptions, but mine was much more serious. And it just kind of escalated from there.”
Severe headaches, which are often associated with migraines, are simply one of the symptoms caused by the condition and limit the full understanding of the disease. For example, Rickert does not have visual auras in her migraine attacks, a common effect for some, and instead experiences numbness in her left side, sometimes resulting in partial paralysis.
“Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to walk for a few minutes because my whole leg would stop working essentially,” she says.
The frequency of migraine attacks for Rickert has fluctuated over the years, but it has generally increased as she has gotten older. Recently, she says, they have occurred as frequently as every other day.
However, the biomedical engineering student still has time for academic and extracurricular excellence. Rickert was certified in Solidworks, a 3D modeling program, as a high school freshman.
At UR, she serves in leadership positions in the UR Society of Women Engineers chapter and as a coach for Transition Opportunities at UR, an inclusive college experience for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Those accomplishments made Rickert a top choice for the AbbVie award.
Her future plans include continuing research in the neurodevelopment field, using electroencephalogram or other imaging technologies to study people with schizophrenia, for example. Independently, Rickert has also researched different strains of migraines, with the intent of better understanding the condition.
“My most recent was actually on hemiplegic migraine and different types of treatment that you could maybe pair together, looking more on the neural level and the genetic level,” she says. “It’s pretty interesting to be able to look at something I have on that level and do a research-style paper to get funding from the NIH.”
Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.
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