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.
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]
