Minding the Gap: Hannah Creamer Bridges Women's Health and Exercise Science

“Well, someone has to, so I guess that's gonna be me,” Hannah Creamer humbly explained when asked what led to her master’s thesis topic.

Creamer, originally from Auckland, New Zealand, is currently working with Professor Sarah Witkowski in the Exercise and Sports Studies department at Smith, studying the impact of the menstrual cycle on maximum athletic effort. While pursuing her bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science with a specialization in exercise physiology, she noticed a significant gap in the literature regarding women’s health in exercise and sports sciences. A project she did trying to address this gap in undergrad was shut down because menstruation was considered a taboo topic. Creamer found this experience "disheartening," but it fixed her interest in the topic, and she came to Smith wanting to break the stigma around menstruation in sports. At Smith, she has found enthusiastic support for her research and has produced preliminary findings that are starkly different from existing research on the subject.

Hannah Creamer, 2025. Photo Courtesy of Lily Serry.

In her pilot study, Creamer examines how different phases of the menstrual cycle impact athletes’ physical performance, as well as their perception of their performance. When participants come in, they fill out a questionnaire about the symptoms they’re experiencing. Then, they engage in a high-intensity exercise test in which they pedal as fast as they can on a stationary bike while wearing a heart rate monitor. Creamer collects data about their power output and how quickly they tire. She also asks participants to rate their symptoms right after getting off the bike. In this way, her study combines subjective participant-reported data with the objective data that she can measure. So far, Creamer has found that participants’ period symptoms affect their performance most during ovulation. She emphasized that these findings are preliminary, but is excited by them. They’re the opposite of what she expected, as other existing research associates ovulation with peak athletic performance.

Creamer presented her findings at the New England Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine (NEACSM) in October. She ultimately enjoyed the experience, but was “terrified” going in. “I have a lot of imposter syndrome, being like, well, who on Earth qualified me to talk about this?” Creamer said. Even though Creamer initially felt overwhelmed about entering a male-dominated space and discussing a neglected area of research, other conference attendees expressed enthusiastic interest in her research.

In addition to the positive reception at the conference, Creamer was “floored” by the amount of interest in her project at Smith. She has had more people willing to participate in her study than she expected, and companies that produce wearable exercise technology have also expressed a desire to work with her. She wants to continue her research in a doctoral program, which would allow her to study a longer timeframe and better address how individuals’ experiences differ at each stage of their menstrual cycle. Despite the resistance she faced in the past, Creamer’s thesis marks the beginning of a deeper understanding of women’s health in athletics.

By Ada Fiala, Quinnlan Steele, and Chelsea Harmon