Seema Yasmin | |
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 Yasmin at Bay Area Book Festival 2025 | |
| Born | Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England |
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Seema Yasmin is a British-American physician, writer and science communicator based at Stanford University. She is Director of Research and Education at the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. [1] During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yasmin helped to debunk myths about the coronavirus.
Yasmin was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England and raised in London to a family of Indian and Burmese ancestry. [2] [3] [4] Her mother, Yasmin Halima, was born in India and is a Distinguished Careers Institute fellow who works on women's health. [5] At the age of seventeen, Yasmin decided that she wanted to take her mother's first name as her surname, and had her name changed with a lawyer. [5] Yasmin trained in biochemistry at Queen Mary University of London and graduated in 2005. [6] She moved to the University of Cambridge to complete a graduate programme in medicine. [7] She started her medical career in the National Health Service, working at Homerton University Hospital for one year. In 2010 Yasmin was awarded a University of California, Los Angeles fellowship to train in clinical research in Botswana. [8] She moved to the United States with her mother. [5] In 2011, Yasmin joined the Epidemic Intelligence Service [9] as a "disease detective" at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she studied outbreaks of disease in prisons, border towns and American Indian reservations. [10] Whilst studying an outbreak of flesh-eating bacteria on the Navajo Nation, Yasmin realised the power of effective science communication, and realised that she wanted to use journalism to shift public policy. [5]
In 2013 Yasmin was made a Dalla Lana Global Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto. [11] Here she focussed on telling the stories of epidemics in an effort to encourage others to learn from tragedy. [12] Soon after completing her fellowship, Yasmin joined The Dallas Morning News as a reporter. [7] [13] Her work there included coverage of the Ebola crisis in Dallas and the epidemic of gun violence in the US. [14] [15] She was a medical analyst for CNN, and had a weekly medical segment on television news partner NBC 5 DFW. [7] She held a simultaneous position as Professor of Public Health at the University of Texas at Dallas. [16] [8] Yasmin delivered the 2016 University of Texas at Austin McGovern Lecture, where she discussed the lessons she had learned reporting from public health emergencies. [17]
Yasmin joined Stanford University as a John S. Knight Fellow in 2017. There she investigated the spread of misinformation and pseudoscience during epidemics. [18] As part of this fellowship, Yasmin started working with Wired to debunk pseudoscience and misinformation on YouTube. She delivered a talk at the TEDx OakLawn event in 2018. In 2019, Yasmin was appointed as Director of the Stanford University Health Communication Initiative. [5]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yasmin used social media, podcasts, [19] and popular science articles to better inform the public about the coronavirus disease. [20] [21] [22] She is also interested in the "spread of myths and hoaxes and rumors and outright lies about vaccines". [23] Yasmin became one of the most trusted public health experts on social media. [24] She used webinars to teach students about how to report responsibly on medical emergencies. [25] [26] In an interview with Bumble, Yasmin explained how to date during the pandemic. [27] A collection of her essays on health and medical misinformation from her newspaper column “Debunked” was published in 2021 as Viral BS : medical myths and why we fall for them. [28]
Her second book, Muslim Women Are Everything, started as a conversation on Twitter and ended as a six-figure book deal. [29]
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