Seema Yasmin

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][30]

• 2016 University of North Texas Mayborn Award for Literary Non-Fiction[38]
• 2016 won an Emmy Award for her documentary Hidden Threat: The Kissing Bug and Chagas Disease[39][40]
• 2017 John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism.[1]
• 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.[23][41]