When: Tuesday, April 6th at 6:00pm
Where: On Zoom. Click here to register.
The Boston Public Library welcomes Emmy Award-winning medical journalist and CNN analyst Dr. Seema Yasmin for an online conversation moderated by BPL President David Leonard. This program, presented in partnership with the GBH Forum Network, is part of both the Lowell Lecture Series sponsored by the Lowell Institute and the BPL’s Repairing America Series.
What happens at the epicenter of an epidemic? How do disease detectives track down patient zero, find the source of contagion, and stop the spread of disease? As an Officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service, Dr. Yasmin was tasked with hunting diseases and chasing epidemics. Inside prisons, across border towns, and within the walls of hospitals and workplaces, she traced microbes and worked to protect communities. Pulling back the curtain on the inner workings of epidemic investigations, Dr. Yasmin tells stories from the front lines of global public health to demonstrate how humans are increasingly connected and epidemics are the new normal.
Dr. Seema Yasmin was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news reporting in 2017 for her reporting on a mass shooting. As a former officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she was deployed as strategic advisor to foreign governments, won awards from the United States Public Health Service for leading epidemic investigations, and was principal investigator for scientific studies on disease outbreaks and their long-term consequences. Yasmin trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and in journalism at the University of Toronto. She practiced medicine in the UK’s National Health Service, completed a fellowship in mathematical modeling at UCLA, and conducted disease modeling research in sub-Saharan Africa. She is author of two published books and three forthcoming books: The Impatient Dr. Lange: One Man’s Fight to End a Global HIV Epidemic, Muslim Women Are Everything: Stereotype-Shattering Stories of Courage, Inspiration and Adventure, and the forthcoming If God Is A Virus (2021), Debunked! Medical Myths and Why They Spread (2021), and The Essential Handbook on Science and Medical Journalism (2022).