Office of Health Literacy Intern
PhD
Posted on 11/12/2025

AbbVie
No salary listed
Waukegan, IL, USA
In Person
Job Description
Office of Health Literacy Intern Overview
Envision spending your summer working with energetic colleagues and inspirational leaders, all while gaining world-class experience in one of the most dynamic organizations in the pharmaceutical industry. This is a reality for AbbVie Interns.
The Office of Health Literacy (OHL) Intern at AbbVie will engage with energetic colleagues and inspirational leaders, gaining world-class experience within one of the most dynamic organizations in the pharmaceutical industry.
The OHL intern will assist in developing health literate patient education materials and conducting user testing to ensure their effectiveness. As part of AbbVie’s commitment to improving health literacy on a global scale, the intern will also collaborate with other scientists on the application of health literacy research to improve patient safety within the Global Patient Safety (GPS) organization.
The GPS organization works collaboratively and strategically with colleagues across the product lifecycle to identify, evaluate, understand, and communicate the safety profile of AbbVie products to protect patients worldwide. The team plays a critical role in evaluating safety data relevant to AbbVie for both pharmaceutical and medical device products.
OHL applies plain language principles to ensure health information is simple, understandable and actionable. The OHL team partners with various departments in the organization to create patient and provider facing tools, including plain language summaries of clinical trial results, patient information leaflets, medication guides, and digital health tools. The OHL team ensures that the health materials they create are easily understandable and culturally competent by conducting user testing to validate their effectiveness.
Key responsibilities include:
The intern’s responsibilities will encompass various user testing related tasks, including, but not limited to:
- Recruitment: Identify and verify appropriate recruitment demographics for user testing sessions. This involves creating appropriate screening questions and ensuring an inclusive representation of users to gather comprehensive feedback.
- Report Writing / Recommendations: Analyze qualitative data collected from user testing interviews, identify valuable insights, and prepare comprehensive reports summarizing the results. These reports will include a comprehensive summary of the user feedback, key observations, and actionable recommendations for enhancing the clarity and effectiveness of patient-facing materials.
- Coding Patient Feedback: Systematically organize and code patient feedback by identifying recurring themes, patterns, and trends.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications
- Currently enrolled in university, pursuing a PharmD, or PhD in Pharmacy, Public Health, Communication, Biomedical Sciences, or other related degree.
- Must be enrolled in university for at least one semester following the internship.
- Ability to summarize complex information.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills.
- Takes initiative and always seeks improvement opportunities.
Preferred Qualifications
- Expected graduation date between December 2026 – June 2027.
Benefits and Amenities
- Competitive pay.
- Relocation support for eligible students.
- Opportunities for professional development and mentorship.
- Access to dynamic project experiences within a world-class pharmaceutical organization.
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