5 minute read
RESEARCH
An Advocate for Minority Health
Dr. Ingrid Hall '80 Leads CDC Studies
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Dr. Ingrid Hall
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).
“I’m not an infectious disease specialist. I workin cancer research, but when health departments around the country needed assistance from the CDC to contact positive cases, I volunteered,” Hall said. As COVID-19 spread, state health departments needed more investigators to document symptoms, contacts and travels of those newly detected. “For five weeks, I stayed up late at night trying to get people in Arizona to answer their phones,” she said. “My job was to tell 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. When she was a freshman at Southeast High School in 1976, a friend took a test that earned him admission to Phillips Exeter Academy, the prestigious East Coast private school. Hall’s competitive nature kicked in.
“I thought, ‘I need to go take this test just to make sure that I can do better than him.’ When I asked my guidance counselor if I had done better than my classmate, she said I blew him out of the water,” Hall chuckled. Her parents didn’t want to send her to New Hampshire. “Instead they said, ‘We’ll send you to the best school in the area,’ and that’s how I ended up at Barstow.”
At the start of her sophomore year, Hall made the transition from an inner city public school to an independent school in the suburbs where she had only a few Black classmates.
“I think the biggest thing was that I didn’t have a car while I was at Barstow so I had to ride the bus as a senior. The bus didn’t come to our side of town, so our parents had to drive a few of us to 55th and Oak to catch it. We were the first ones on and the last ones off every day,” Hall said. “I didn’t really find Barstow much of a culture shock. There were some minor adjustments, but not terribly huge socially and not terribly huge academically even.”
She gravitated toward science classes; chemistry with Art Crumm, physics with Mark Adams and honors biology with Peggy Mitchell. One conversation with Ms. Mitchell, Hall said, resulted in a decision that changed her life.
“I asked, if she was going to advise a student to go somewhere for marine biology where would she recommend. She didn’t even have to think, she just said ‘Duke’ and I said, ‘That’s where I’m going.’”
Hall made it to Duke, but never even saw the marine biology lab. Instead, she started studying biomedical engineering. She hesitated when she got to three dimensional calculus.
“Triple intervals and moments of inertia? I figured out that biomedical engineering was like ‘Bionic Man’ stuff, pacemakers and artificial limbs. I needed some real viruses and DNA and genes. I switched to biology and I was in love.”
Hall received her bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1985 and earned a Ph.D. in genetics & molecular biology down the road at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “That was seven years of torture basically,” she said. “but I didn’t know how to quit.” She added a master’s of public health degree in epidemiology in 1998.
REAL PEOPLE, REAL RESULTS
Long days and nights spent in labs doing doctoral work and “writing papers nobody could understand except for other scientists” led Hall to a decision that informs her work today. She wanted to work in an area that would have a positive impact on the lives of regular people, and particularly, to help people of color make decisions that would reduce their risk for getting cancer and improve their survival rates.
“I’m a Black woman in America. It’s always been common knowledge to me that Black people have higher incidence rates of just about everything except melanoma skin cancer. They have higher mortality for everything,” Hall said. “In my opinion, the whole goal of public health is to stand in the gap for people who are less capable of doing that for themselves, the most underserved, the most marginalized, the most oppressed, those with the highest disease burden. And who are they? They are people of color and poor people.”
Hall led the African American Women and Mass Media (AAMM) study, which used targeted messaging to African American women via Black radio and print media to raise awareness about the importance of mammograms in early breast cancer detection.
“The point was to create something culturally appropriate to this community that looked the way they look, that talked to them the way they wanted to be spoken to,” and reached them where they live,” Hall said. The resulting public service campaign featured Black women sharing their personal breast cancer survival stories. At the end of the year in Savannah, where the campaign included posters and spots on Black radio, screening among Black women rose 46%. In Macon, using the radio spots only, screening went up 20%. The campaign placed in the top three of four categories entered of the National Public Health Information Coalition Awards for Excellence in Public Health Communications.
“That was a whole ten years of my life right there, but it worked out well. It proved that if you talk to people the way they want to be talked to and put messages where they told you they would see them, they may actually go get screenings,” Hall said, “and that’s what we want for everybody.”
