In Memoriam: Misti Hewatt Yang, 1979-2023

Misti Hewatt Yang, the Mellon Assistant Professor of the Public Communication of Science and Technology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, died on March 23. She was 44 years old.

A native of Atlanta, Dr. Yang graduated from South Gwinnett High School where she was a nationally-ranked debater. After graduating from Wellesley College in 2001, she worked in a number of jobs: investment analyst, car salesperson, food critic, freelance writer, social media director, event planner, and disc jockey. She then returned to higher education earning a master’s degree in communications at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and a Ph.D. in communications at the University of Maryland.

Since 2021, Dr. Yang served as the Mellon Assistant Professor of the Public Communication of Science and Technology at Vanderbilt University, where she taught courses such as “The Rhetoric of Technoscience,” “Public Communication of Science,” and “Ethics in Science and Technology Communication.”