Anthropology major Hallie Bates ’15 has been awarded the 2015 Distinguished Public Sociology and Anthropology Award.  The prize is awarded to those students majoring or minoring in Sociology or Anthropology who demonstrate an exemplary engagement in public scholarship/and or community service.  The award recognizes those who have exhibited sociological or anthropological imagination in connecting the knowledge of their major to public service and/or scholarship.  The award also recognizes those students who have made meaningful impacts on the community.

Hallie has been involved in a wide variety of community service and public scholarship activities in Maine, Vermont, and the Dominican Republic.  During the summer of 2014, Hallie served as a volunteer interpreter with Partners for Rural Health in the Dominican Republic an organization providing medical care to more than 2,000 Dominican patients in 15 different rural villages without other health care access.  She interpreted between Spanish-speaking patients and English-speaking health care providers during vaccinations and check-ups, and she also helped facilitate educational seminars for Dominican villagers.  In addition to volunteering with Partners for Rural Health, Hallie worked among infectious disease specialists, internists, and pathologists on the PROVIDE study, at the UVM Medical School.  The PROVIDE study, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation project, aims to understand the biological basis for the underperformance of oral rotavirus and polio vaccines in children throughout the developing world.  Since 2013, Hallie has served as a volunteer with Mid Coast Hospital’s emergency department in Brunswick, Maine.  This semester she has been volunteering as an Emergency Medical Technician with the United States Ambulance Services.

The Distinguished Public Sociology and Anthropology Award will be presented to Hallie during the Honors Day ceremony on May 6th.