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Seema Yasmin
British writer and medical doctor From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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.
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Education and early career
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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]
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Career
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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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Selected publications
Peer-reviewed scientific papers
- Ngugi, E. N.; Roth, E.; Mastin, Theresa; Nderitu, M. G.; Yasmin, Seema (1 September 2012). "Female sex workers in Africa: Epidemiology overview, data gaps, ways forward". SAHARA-J: Journal of Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS. 9 (3): 148–153. doi:10.1080/17290376.2012.743825. ISSN 1729-0376. PMC 4560463. PMID 23237069.[30]
- Regan, Joanna J.; Traeger, Marc S.; Humpherys, Dwight; Mahoney, Dianna L.; Martinez, Michelle; Emerson, Ginny L.; Tack, Danielle M.; Geissler, Aimee; Yasmin, Seema; Lawson, Regina; Williams, Velda (1 June 2015). "Risk Factors for Fatal Outcome From Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in a Highly Endemic Area—Arizona, 2002–2011". Clinical Infectious Diseases. 60 (11): 1659–1666. doi:10.1093/cid/civ116. ISSN 1058-4838. PMC 4706357. PMID 25697742.[31]
Selected works
- The Impatient Dr. Lange: One Man's Fight to End the Global HIV Epidemic, ISBN 9781421426624 Joep Lange Institute (31 August 2018). "Seema Yasmin introduces her book The Impatient Dr. Lange". YouTube. Retrieved 1 November 2018.[32][33]
- Yasmin, Seema; Azim, Fahmida (2020). Muslim women are everything : stereotype-shattering stories of courage, inspiration, and adventure. Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-294703-1. OCLC 1111254482.[34][35]
- "From Liberia, Ebola Survivors Report They Are Still Afflicted with Disabling Symptoms". Scientific American. Retrieved 11 May 2020.[36]
- If God is a virus: poems. Haymarket Press. 2021. ISBN 9781642594591.
- Yasmin, Seema (2021). Viral BS : medical myths and why we fall for them. ISBN 978-1-4214-4040-8.[28]
- Yasmin, Seema (2022). What the fact? (First ed.). New York. ISBN 978-1-6659-0003-4. OCLC 1344013866.
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Awards and honours
- 2016 University of North Texas Mayborn Award for Literary Non-Fiction[37]
- 2016 won an Emmy Award for her documentary Hidden Threat: The Kissing Bug and Chagas Disease[38][39]
- 2017 John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism.[1]
- 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.[23][40]
References
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