Seth Collings Hawkins comes full circle with an anthropological education
Seth Collings Hawkins, M.D., is embracing lifelong learning by graduating with yet another degree. The emergency medicine physician is building upon the anthropological foundation he began at Yale decades ago, even with one of his same professors.
While successfully holding a ton of jobs—emergency and wilderness medicine physician; contract medical director, officer, and adviser to more than 15 organizations; associate professor of emergency medicine; business owner; published author, magazine editor; podcaster; and more—Hawkins applied for the dual Master of Public Health and Master of Arts in Applied Medical Anthropology (MPH/MA) degree at UNC Charlotte. He was 50 years old at the time.
Going for the dual degree was a natural progression for Hawkins who had been an anthropology major as an undergraduate. After 25 years as an emergency physician, he started to think more about the things he learned while completing his undergraduate degree—about humans and culture and meeting people where they are.
“I was dealing with one patient at a time and sitting with patients and families and trying to work through sometimes the worst day of their lives,” he said. “I was grappling with their identities and their culture and their sort of place-based cores that they would bring in and lay on my lap and have me help them solve a problem. I realized I was doing applied anthropology as much as medicine; I just wasn’t calling it that.”
The three-year program MPH/MA degree straddles two UNC Charlotte colleges—the College of Health and Human Services for the MPH and the College of Humanities & Earth and Social Sciences for the MA. It emphasizes the cultural and social dimensions of health and disease in an effort to effectively improve health outcomes.
One of the courses Hawkins took at Yale as an undergraduate was biological anthropology with Johnathan Marks, Ph.D. The same professor has been faculty in the Department of Anthropology at UNC Charlotte since 2000.
“When I was exploring UNC Charlotte, I learned the very same Dr. Marks was on the faculty here! So as a grad student I got to study with my same professor of 30 years earlier and challenge him with my lived experience,” said Hawkins. “This ended up with a directed study elective… and I got to do some original research that I really look forward to publishing shortly.”
Hawkins also credits Lydia Light, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology, for being an important mentor during his journey through this program, having two classes with her in the final year of his program.
“Closing out my experience with her class was emblematic of all the amazing educational experiences I had preceding it as well, from so many talented and invested faculty,” said Hawkins, “And my fellow students have been an absolute highlight of this experience. They are whip smart and launching out to make a true difference in the world.”
“I began to realize that much more of what I was doing was really public health,” said Hawkins, now 54. “Medical school teaches you to take care of individual patients but being the medical director for state parks or for the U.S. Forest Service or even just for a county EMS system, I was talking about populations of people and how to care for people at scale and I hadn’t been really well trained for that.”
He describes public health as practical and anthropology as theoretical and is transfixed by how they fit so well together.
“The way that it’s so beautiful to see them working together is that anthropology can problematize the conventions that occur in public health to make it better,” explained Hawkins.
Read more of Seth Collings Hawkins’ story.
Story by Directors of Communication Pam Davis, CHHS, and Jenn Conway, CHESS. Photos courtesy of Seth Collings Hawkins.