BROOKINGS – As a medical doctor, journalist, professor and former disease detective, Seema Yasmin is more than qualified to speak about epidemics.
She will visit South Dakota State University Oct. 17 to lecture and speak to classes as part of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Campus Consortium.
Her public lecture, titled “Communicating About Diseases in the Age of Epidemics,” is at 7 p.m. Oct. 17 in the South Dakota Art Museum Auditorium.
Yasmin trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and in journalism at the University of Toronto. She worked as a doctor in a London hospital.
She was a disease detective in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she investigated disease outbreaks in maximum-security prisons, health-care facilities and American Indian reservations.
Yasmin is currently exploring the way news spreads during epidemics as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.
As a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grant recipient, Yasmin wrote a series of stories on the aftermath of Ebola on survivors in Liberia.
As a staff writer at The Dallas Morning News, Yasmin reported on epidemics, emerging diseases and the long-term impact of outbreaks. She has won numerous awards, including an Emmy, and in 2017 was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in breaking news with a team for the July 2016 mass shooting in downtown Dallas.
Yasmin has also taught public health as a professor of practice at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, The Toronto Star, Thomson Reuters Foundation and peer-reviewed medical journals.
Yasmin’s campus visit is presented through the Pulitzer Center’s partnership with SDSU’s communication studies and journalism and mass communication departments. She is scheduled to speak in several classes.
The public lecture is sponsored by the Pulitzer Center, the South Dakota World Affairs Council and the Fillbrandt Forum, an endowment from Marian and Casey Fillbrandt. Casey Fillbrandt was the first general manager of the South Dakota Newspaper Association.
The Pulitzer Center is an award-winning nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to supporting independent international journalism that U.S. media organizations are increasingly less able to do.
The center’s educational initiatives provide students with fresh reporting from around the world, help them think critically about the creation and dissemination of news, and inspire them to become active consumers and producers of information. The partnership includes an international fellowship for a SDSU student to report on an underreported issue with the Pulitzer Center disseminating the fellow’s work. Previously, Jamie Walsh reported on health and obesity issues in the United Kingdom, Melisa Goss reported on human trafficking in Cambodia, and Makenzie Huber reported on solar ovens made in South Dakota and distributed in the Dominican Republic. In summer 2017, Palak Barmaiya reported on a sustainable living program in India.
For additional information, contact Lyle Olson in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at 605-688-4171 or lyle.olson@sdstate.edu.
