USF College of Public Health’s (COPH) Dr. Ismael Hoare, Anna Mayor and Tailyn Osorio are recipients of the 2022 USF Hispanic Heritage Awards.

The USF Status of Latinos (SOL) Committee presents the awards each year to “outstanding Latinx members of the USF community making a profound difference” and who are contributing to the Latinx community through academic research and/or community service.

All three awardees are active members of the COPH’s Salud Latina USF. The initiative aims to address important public health issues among Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. and abroad through outreach, education and research.

Hoare, assistant professor, is experienced in global health education and working with communities with low resources. He is currently the concentration lead of the global health practice program and teaches in the global humanitarian assistance, disaster management and homeland security program.

Specializing in Caribbean and Central American health systems, human resources for health, community assessment and injury prevention in the field of disaster preparedness, he has led interdisciplinary teams that investigated the factors that contribute to health service utilization. He’s also developed health education programs tailored to Belizean community and conducted a community developed needs assessment survey to identify the impact of chronic diseases within peri-urban populations. His research helps contribute to the development of interventions to reduce the negative impact on the health of the indigenous populations in Central America.

“Dr. Hoare is a valued member of the core faculty team of the Salud Latina. He has been involved in development of the initiative since the onset and actively participates in the research aspects of the initiative as well as Latinx student mentoring, outreach and education and scholarly activities,” said Dr. Arlene Calvo, associate professor and coordinator of the Salud Latina. “Dr. Hoare, not being a native Spanish-language speaker, rose to the occasion to participate and present in the monthly Spanish-language led webinar series, which has been a tremendous feat.”

“Anna Mayor was instrumental in the initial organization and launching of Salud Latina USF. Through her position and experience developing communications strategies, she catalyzed the communications and outreach component of the initiative,” Calvo said. “Anna’s vision on communications has tremendously contributed to the Salud Latina USF outreach and education component among Latinx communities.”

Mayor, engagement officer in the COPH Office of Engagement and Constituent Relations, is a strategic communicator and writer with a passion for working in non-profit, health communication and telling compelling stories.

A double alumna of USF, she earned a bachelor’s degree in mass communications/magazine journalism and a master’s degree in strategic communication management. Mayor has worked as a communications professional for more than 13 years, first starting out as a journalist writing both news and magazine feature stories.

She then began working in the field of non-profit communication for an HIV/AIDS organization providing education and training resources to health care professionals on the prevention and treatment of HIV, focusing specifically on providers located in Florida and the Caribbean.

She continued her health communication path after joining the COPH in 2015, where she oversees the management of the college’s social media pages, writing stories and news releases to promote the college’s story and assists with the creation of both educational and marketing materials ensuring adherence to branding guidelines.

The daughter of an immigrant Filipina mother and military father as well as a first-generation college graduate, she is strongly connected to the Latino community having married her husband Manuel Mayor, who is of Cuban/Colombian background, and having two multiracial Latino children, an 8-year-old daughter Mariella and 5-year-old son Manuel.

She has been working with Salud Latina USF from the beginning, first assisting with social media graphic creation before morphing into a larger communications role to include establishing a branding presence, social media page creation, contacting news media, listserv management, mass email marketing and marketing flyer/collateral creation.

USF graduate student Tailyn Osorio is a trilingual interpreter and research assistant with Salud Latina.

Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in American Sign Language interpreting from the University of North Florida, she moved on to become a student at USF in the graduate applied anthropology program focusing on cultural and sociolinguistic applied anthropology.

Osorio has been working with Salud Latina for the last year and is involved in research activities, student engagement and coordination, community outreach and education and scholarly activities.

Raised to be proud of her culture and Cuban/Puerto Rican/Caribbean identity, Osorio’s hobbies are hiking, reading, skating and dancing. Her research interests are deaf studies, deaf anthropology, disabilities accessibilities, health and health access in the Americas.

“For the past year, Tailyn has brought her passion for disabilities activism, social justice and advocacy for Latinos to her work with Salud Latina USF. She is quick to volunteer within the initiative and goes above and beyond with her creativity in creating social media content,” Calvo said. “She is not afraid to bring her ideas forth and to provide feedback to the rest of the team. She is a role model for other Latino students striving to support their community.”

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health