Yellowlees Douglas, PhD

Yellowlees Douglas, PhD, has dedicated over 35 years to studying how writing works, including one of the first-ever studies of student writing outcomes in online classrooms, conducted in 1986. Her interest in how reading works in novel environments, like hypertext fiction, led her to discover the cognitive, linguistic, and psychological bases for reading comprehension and recall. Her interest in writing led to over 60 publications spanning more than a dozen disciplines, ranging from management and computer science to genetics, ophthalmology, gastroenterology, and pulmonary medicine—including one study currently being used in research on COVID-19. Her fiction was selected for Post Modern Fiction: A Norton Anthology, and her two most recent books, The Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer (2015) and The Biomedical Writer: What You Need to Succeed in Academic Medicine (2018) were both published by Cambridge University Press.

Yellowlees is a veteran and founder and director of four writing programs, including a writing in the disciplines program, a university-wide first-year writing program, a program in business communication, and an NIH-funded program for faculty, dedicated to writing grants and manuscripts in basic, translational, and clinical medicine, all at the University of Florida. For 15 years, Yellowlees was also a copywriter and partner in an advertising agency with branches in New York, Philadelphia, and London, catering to Fortune 500 clients, including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Cunard Seabourn Cruise Lines, and Abbott Laboratories.

Yellowlees was a contestant on Jeopardy! in 2013 and one of the authors of an amicus curiae brief in the US Supreme Court Case, Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Assn., argued in 2010.

Yellowlees received her BA and MA degrees in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan and her PhD in reading and writing in post-secondary education from New York University.