James Hamblin (journalist)

Hamblin grew up in Munster, Indiana and graduated from Munster High School.[1] He graduated from the School of Medicine at Indiana University, then did his internship in internal medicine at Mount Auburn Hospital.[2] Hamblin began a residency as a radiologist at the Medical Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. During his residency, Hamblin trained in improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles.[3] He says he was regularly mistaken for a student due to looking younger than his age, and has often been compared to the sitcom teenage genius Doogie Howser.[4][3][5] He later completed a residency in Preventive Medicine at Yale University.

In 2012, Hamblin chose to pursue a career in media and joined The Atlantic and became the editor for its health channel, which had been launched in 2011.[3][1] In 2013, he created an online comedy video show about health and lifestyle topics on The Atlantic website called If Our Bodies Could Talk,[6] for which he was a finalist for a Webby award for Best Web Personality/Host[3][7] and was last produced in 2017.[8][9] He has been named among the 140 people to follow on Twitter by Time, and BuzzFeed has called him "the most delightful MD ever" in response to his work with that show.[10][3] He also authored If Our Bodies Could Talk, a nonfiction book about human health published by Doubleday.[11][12][13]

Hamblin is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic.[14] He has given talks at Harvard Medical School, Wharton School of Business, South by Southwest, and TEDMED. In 2016, he served as moderator at the launch of the White House Precision Medicine Initiative where he interviewed President Barack Obama.[15] Hamblin is a past Yale University Poynter Fellow in journalism.[16] He is board certified in Public Health and General Preventive Medicine.[17]

In July 2019, Hamblin married Sarah Yager, a managing editor for The Atlantic.[18]