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Tasmiha Khan, MA

Tasmiha Khan
2025 Nova Media Fellow

Tasmiha Khan is an award-winning journalist specializing in health equity, tech, wellness, and the intersection of faith, culture, and public health. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and Vox, among other national publications.

Khan holds degrees in neuroscience and behavior and psychology from Wesleyan University, and a Master’s in Social Impact from Claremont Lincoln University. She is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT (2021-2022), USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism Fellow, and Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow. Her reporting has earned recognition including the National Press Foundation’s Kozik Environmental Justice Journalism Award, National Geographic Society’s COVID-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists, and the Racial Equity and Interfaith Cooperation Award.

As a hijabi Muslim American mother and former medical student, Khan brings lived experience to her reporting on maternal health disparities, cultural barriers in health care, and the challenges facing working caregivers. She founded Brighter Dawns, a nonprofit that improved health conditions for over 20,000 people in Bangladesh by empowering women and building essential infrastructure.

Khan’s investigative work focuses on translating complex scientific research into accessible narratives that drive policy change and community action. Her 2021 National Geographic piece on Muslim vaccine responses exemplified her ability to connect individual experiences with broader public health trends. She is also an inaugural Altavoz Lab Fellow with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ palabra platform, expanding health journalism to underserved communities.

When Khan isn’t working on equity issues while advocating for evidence-based policies that support caregivers and families, she authors picture books for children. 

Media Fellowship Project

How modern caregiving shapes mental health and society

Parental Metamorphosis is a journalism project examining the profound biological, psychological, and social transformations that caregivers—mothers, fathers, and grandparents—undergo while raising children. Despite mounting scientific evidence that caregiving triggers neurobiological changes as significant as adolescence, our health care systems, workplace policies, and social structures largely ignore this developmental process, creating a $14.2 billion annual economic burden.

This project will explore the science of caregiver mental health using Nova Institute’s “people, places, and planet” framework. The reporting will connect cutting-edge neuroscience research on parental brain changes with real-world policy implications, examining how systemic failures disproportionately impact marginalized communities while highlighting innovative solutions that support both individual wellbeing and community resilience.

 By translating emerging research into accessible, solutions-oriented narratives, this reporting aims to reshape healthcare practices, influence workplace policies, and advance cultural understanding of caregiving as a profound developmental journey that deserves comprehensive support rather than individual endurance.

Media Fellow Publications

Education and Training
  • BA, Psychology, Neuroscience & Behavior, Wesleyan University
  • MA, Social Impact, Claremont Lincoln University
Selected Honors
  •  2024-2025: Kapor Foundation Investigative Technology Fellow
  • 2024: Round Earth Media – International Women’s Media Fund Grantee
  • 2023-2024: Columbia Journalism Lipman Center’s Initiative in Reporting on Race & Criminal Justice Grantee
  • 2023- 2024: USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism Fellow and Impact Grantee
  • 2023: Beyond the Barrel of the Gun Fellowship for Amsterdam News
  • 2023: Picture Book Rising Stars Mentee
  • 2022-2023: Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellowship
  • 2022: Interfaith America Emerging Leaders Award
  • 2022: Altavoz Lab Fellow by palabra of National Association of Hispanic Journalists
  • 2022: Ferriss – UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship
  • 2022: LaunchPad Fellowship for NextGen Journalists
  • 2022: Richard C. Longworth Media Fellowship by The Pulitzer Center
Selected Publications
Recent Posts
Categories

Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.