Convocation: Sonia Shah

Investigating how science and politics collide in a lop-sided world, Sonia Shah is a critically acclaimed writer on science, human rights, and international politics. Shah was born in New York City to Indian immigrants. Growing up, she shuttled between the northeastern United States where her parents practiced medicine and Mumbai and Bangalore, India, where her extended working-class family lived, developing a life-long interest in inequality between and within societies. As an undergraduate at Oberlin College, she earned her BA in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience. Her books have included Crude: The Story of Oil and her prize-winning drug industry exposé, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients. In her latest book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, Shah reveals the amazing story of malaria, a disease that infects one-half billion people every year, killing nearly 1 million – despite the fact that we’ve known how to prevent and cure the disease for over one hundred years.