Keynote by Amanda Yarnell on Influencing the influencers: A creator-engaged playbook for spreading evidence-based health information on social media, 28 Nov 2024
Thursday, 28 November 2024, 4.15 pm CET
About Amanda Yarnell
Amanda is the senior director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication.
Under Amanda’s leadership the Center launched its Public Health Creators program, which equips and inspires influential creators to spread evidence-based health information on social media. Her Harvard Chan team is also conducting interdisciplinary, creator-engaged research to study how creators are reshaping health narratives and health behaviors.
Amanda is also a lecturer in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, where she is preparing public health students to credibly communicate health information in an increasingly skeptical and fragmented world.
In her work at the Center Amanda leverages two decades of experience in science and health journalism, media product development, and audience engagement. Before joining Harvard’s faculty, Amanda worked as a science journalist and newsroom leader at C&EN, an award-winning nonprofit science news outlet published by the American Chemical Society. She currently serves on the board of Science To People, a nonprofit developing an AI research assistant for creators. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University and a Masters of Science in Chemistry from MIT.
About the Lecture
The $16 billion influencer marketing industry is often seen as churning out viral videos exclusively for profit. Now imagine if we used that same playbook to disseminate evidence-based public health information. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication is connecting creators with public health evidence in a bid to do just that. By deploying its Public Health Creators program as a field experiment on TikTok, the Center has identified simple, cost-effective, and creator-led interventions that can be deployed at scale to influence health content on such platforms. Join us to discuss how “influencing the influencers” might improve health information ecosystems on social media and even influence the health beliefs and behaviors of social media users.

We are pleased to invite you to join this guest lecture, which is part of our CDHI Lecture Series Digital Health Forum. Registration is not required. Please be aware that we will be recording this guest lecture and will be making it available in our teaching library. If you have any questions, please contact Victoria Brügger (victoria.bruegger@unisg.ch) prior to the start of the guest lecture.
Prof. Dr. Tobias Kowatsch, Associate Professor for Digital Health Interventions, Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, University of Zurich; Director, School of Medicine, University of St.Gallen (HSG); Scientific Director, Centre for Digital Health Interventions (CDHI), ETH Zurich & HSG; Principal Investigator, Future Health Technologies programme, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore-ETH Centre, Singapore
Prof. Dr. Elgar Fleisch, Professor of Information Management, ETH Zürich; Professor of Technology Management, University of St.Gallen; Advisory Board Member, CDHI, ETH Zürich & University of St.Gallen; Principal Investigator, Future Health Technologies programme, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore-ETH Centre, Singapore
Prof. Dr. Florian von Wangenheim, Professor of Technology Marketing, ETH Zurich & Advisory Board Member, CDHI; Principal Investigator, Future Health Technologies programme, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore-ETH Centre, Singapore