Bio
Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, poet, medical doctor and author. Yasmin served as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where she investigated disease outbreaks and was principal investigator on a number of CDC studies. Yasmin trained in journalism at the University of Toronto and in medicine at the University of Cambridge.
Yasmin was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news in 2017 with a team from The Dallas Morning News for coverage of a mass shooting, and recipient of an Emmy for her reporting on neglected diseases. She received multiple grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for coverage of gender based violence in India and the aftermath of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. In 2017, Yasmin was a John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University investigating the spread of health misinformation and disinformation during public health crises. Previously she was a science correspondent at The Dallas Morning News, medical analyst for CNN, and professor of public health at the University of Texas at Dallas. She teaches crisis management and crisis communication at the UCLA Anderson School of Management as a Visiting Assistant Professor.
She is the author of eight non-fiction, fiction, poetry and childrens books, including: What the Fact?! Finding the Truth in All the Noise (Simon and Schuster, 2022); Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall For Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021); Muslim Women Are Everything: Stereotype-Shattering Stories of Courage, Inspiration and Adventure (HarperCollins, 2020); If God Is A Virus: Poems (Haymarket, 2021); Unbecoming: A Novel (Simon and Schuster, 2024); Djinnology: An Illuminated Compendium of Spirits and Stories from the Muslim World (Chronicle, 2024); and The ABCs of Queer History (Workman Books, 2024). Her writing appears in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, WIRED, Scientific American and other outlets.
Yasmin’s unique expertise in epidemics and communications has been called upon by the Vatican, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, the Aspen Institute, the Skoll Foundation, the Biden White House, and others. She teaches a new paradigm for trust-building and evidence-based communication to leadership at the World Health Organization and CDC. In 2019, she was the inaugural director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative.
Her scholarly work focuses on the spread of scientific misinformation and disinformation, information equity, and the varied susceptibilities of different populations to false information about health and science. In 2020, she received a fellowship from the Emerson Collective for her work on inequitable access to health information. She teaches multimedia storytelling to medical students in the REACH program.
