Samantha Yammine


Samantha Yammine is a Canadian science communicator. She completed her PhD in 2019 at the University of Toronto.

Education

Yammine earned her PhD in the Department of Molecular Genetics researching in Derek van der Kooy's neurobiology lab at the University of Toronto. She researches activation and quiescence of neural stem cells and the fate specification of their progeny using clonal lineage tracing and single cell transcriptomics strategies.

Career

Yammine is a science communicator. Her primary platform is Instagram, where she shares photographs, neuroscience news and facts, and items pertaining to daily life as a scientist.
In August 2017 she joined a group of science communicators to launch the Scientist Selfies project, a crowd-funded experiment using social media to test whether scientists sharing science through selfies on Instagram are rated differently in terms of warmth, trustworthiness, and competency. Using the hashtag "#ScientistsWhoSelfie", the international and interdisciplinary team raised over $10,000 and collected over one thousand images from across the world.
She was an invited speaker at the 2018 USA Science and Engineering Festival and the 2018 Science Writers and Communicators of Canada.
Yammine was given a bursary as an 'emerging producer' by the World Congress for Science and Factual Producers in 2017.
In March 2018, Science magazine published a personal essay by a PhD candidate that critiqued academia's readiness to celebrate Yammine's and others' use of Instagram as a way to correct for systemic gender biases in STEM fields. Yammine and three coauthors replied with a letter in Science the following month.
In March 2019, Yammine interviewed Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques live while he was at the International Space Station.