School of Medicine


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  • Seema Yasmin

    Seema Yasmin

    Clinical Assistant Professor, Medicine - Primary Care and Population Health

    BioSeema 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.

  • Grace Chen Yu

    Grace Chen Yu

    Clinical Associate Professor, Medicine - Primary Care and Population Health

    BioDr. Yu is a modern-day version of the “old-fashioned family doc” who delights in caring for patients from “cradle to grave,” while also promoting the health of her community and developing the future leaders of family medicine. On any particular day, one might find her counseling a long-time smoker on quitting, draining an abscess in clinic, delivering a baby, doing a phone (or sometimes home) visit with one of her elderly patients, lecturing about High-Value Health Care, facilitating a diabetes group visit, singing the praises of coordinated primary care to politicians, discussing end-of-life options with a hospitalized patient, or sharing some of her stories as mother-doctor-teacher with one of her advisees. In 2016, adding one more hat to the mix, Dr. Yu became Program Director of the 24-resident Stanford Health Care - O’Connor Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program. Whereas the old-fashioned family doc was a master at caring for patients at different ages and stages of life, as a modern-day family physician, Dr. Yu is committed to researching ways to do so more effectively and efficiently. She considers it a privilege to be a part of her patients' lives and hopes to help both her patients and her trainees find a path to better health and happiness. To keep herself in great health, Dr. Yu enjoys playing the piano, photography, scuba diving, adventure travel (all the more adventurous with her three children in tow!), and spending time with her family and friends.

  • Ilana Rachel Yurkiewicz

    Ilana Rachel Yurkiewicz

    Clinical Assistant Professor, Medicine - Primary Care and Population Health

    BioDr. Yurkiewicz is a primary care doctor with fellowship training and board certification in internal medicine, oncology, and hematology. She is a clinical assistant professor of primary care and population health in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.

    She provides expert, compassionate clinical care for patients, advocates for them as a medical journalist, and researches ways to improve their lives through better health and quality of life.

    She has a special interest in cancer survivorship and improving transitions between oncology and primary care. Her practice is uniquely focused on providing comprehensive care for patients with a history of cancer as well as those carrying genetic diagnoses of elevated risk.

    For each patient, her goal is to provide thoughtful, compassionate, and holistic care.

    As a journalist, she strives to bridge the gaps between academic medicine and everyday lives. She has been a regular columnist for Scientific American and MDEdge. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications and been reprinted in The Atlantic and The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology.

    Dr. Yurkiewicz is the author of the book Fragmented: A Doctor’s Quest to Piece Together American Health Care from the publisher W.W. Norton.

    She has co-authored research articles that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Clinical Oncology, Genetics in Medicine, and other peer-reviewed publications. She also has served as an editorial board member of the journal Hematology News.

    An additional interest of Dr. Yurkiewicz is bioethics. She interned with the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, conducted extensive research, and published her discoveries in the New England Journal of Medicine, Penn Bioethics Journal, and Ivy Journal of Ethics.

    She has presented her research discoveries to her peers at meetings of the American Society of Hematology, Society of Hospital Medicine, National Society of Genetic Counselors, and elsewhere.

    She is a member of the American College of Physicians and an associate member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and American Society of Hematology.