RE SEARCH
AN ADVOCATE FOR MINORITY HEALTH
DR. INGRID HALL ’80 LEADS CDC STUDIES
DR. INGRID HALL LOVES TO TRAVEL. But instead of spending last summer planning an adventure to Dubai, she hunkered down in her Atlanta home, calling people who had tested positive for covid-19. Hall was on a remote deployment to the Arizona Department of Health for her employer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
them to stay home for ten days and to make sure everyone in the household isolated and quarantined.” When the special assignment ended, Hall returned to her work as an epidemiologist with the CDC Division of Cancer Prevention and Control. Her research focuses on culturally relevant ways to publicize the need for participation in cancer screening and early detection for minority populations. Her journey to a public health career, Hall says, began at Barstow. A PATH TOWARD PUBLIC HEALTH “Barstow changed the trajectory of my life. It changed my thinking about what was possible,” Hall said.
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“I’m not an infectious disease specialist. I work
When she was a freshman at Southeast High School
in cancer research, but when health departments
in 1976, a friend took a test that earned him admission
around the country needed assistance from the CDC
to Phillips Exeter Academy, the prestigious East Coast
to contact positive cases, I volunteered,” Hall said. As
private school. Hall’s competitive nature kicked in.
covid-19 spread, state health departments needed
“I thought, ‘I need to go take this test just to make sure
more investigators to document symptoms, contacts
that I can do better than him.’ When I asked my guid-
and travels of those newly detected. “For five weeks, I
ance counselor if I had done better than my classmate,
stayed up late at night trying to get people in Arizona
she said I blew him out of the water,” Hall chuckled.
to answer their phones,” she said. “My job was to tell
Her parents didn’t want to send her to New Hampshire.
