Sonia Shah ’90 to Deliver Commencement Address to Class of 2025

Sonia Shah '90, an investigative journalist and critically acclaimed author of prize-winning books on migration, disease, and human-animal relations, will deliver the keynote address for Oberlin College and Conservatory's Commencement ceremony honoring the Class of 2025 on Monday, May 26. She will also be awarded an honorary doctor of humanities degree.

A persuasive writer and fierce skeptic, Shah challenges our popular assumptions and long-held scientific beliefs about everything from the way we test the safety and effectiveness of new drugs to how we combat infectious disease. A throughline of her work is mythbusting, an extended argument that what we have been taught to believe about the world-and about each other-is often based on flawed logic, lousy science, or overtly racist beliefs.

But whether Shah is writing about microbes, migration, or pandemics, she reinforces her arguments with rigorous research, making her one of the most trusted expert voices in modern science literature. For example, in her 2004 book, Crude: The Story of Oil, Shah's eloquent argument for us to ditch "our oil-drenched society" and "chart a new energy future" has even greater resonance today: 2024 was the hottest year on the planet since record-keeping began in 1880.

Her other books include 2010's The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, long-listed for the Royal Society Winton Prize; 2016's Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science/technology; and 2020's The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, which was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and was selected as a best nonfiction book of 2020 by Publishers Weekly. Shah received a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her forthcoming book, Special: The Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea.

Oberlin President Carmen Twillie Ambar, who spoke with Shah on the Oberlin podcast Running to the Noise earlier this year, says the commencement address comes at a meaningful moment for both the college and the world. "Throughout 2025, Oberlin is celebrating our achievement of carbon neutrality on campus. That milestone underscores how vital it is to be responsible stewards of the Earth in the fight against climate change-something Sonia explores deeply in her work. Given that so many Oberlin students and alums are committed to sustainability and environmental justice, Sonia's insights and wisdom are a powerful and timely addition to this year's commencement ceremony."

Shah's bylines have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and the Nation. A popular public speaker and 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Shah has lectured at universities and colleges nationwide, including Columbia's Earth Institute, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Georgetown. She also gave a popular TED Talk, "3 reasons we still haven't gotten rid of malaria."

Shah was born in New York City to Indian immigrants. Growing up, she shuttled between the northeastern United States, where her mother and father practiced medicine, and Mumbai and Bangalore, India, where her extended working-class family lived. "Shah makes clear that her interest in migration is personal," wrote Richard O. Prum, the W.R. Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University, in his New York Times' review of The New Great Migration. "The daughter of a couple who emigrated from India to New York, she writes that her parents' relocation 'instilled in me an acute feeling of being somehow out of place, one that's taken nearly five decades to quell.'"

Since earning a bachelor's degree in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience at Oberlin, Shah has been an active and generous alum. She served as editor-in-chief of The Oberlin Review and participated on a career panel during the paper's 150th anniversary celebration. Shah's son, Kush Bulmer, is also an Obie; he graduated in 2022.

Shah joins a list of notable authors to visit campus as Oberlin Commencement speakers, among them Robert Frost (1937), Alex Haley (1976), Maya Angelou (1983), David Sedaris (2018), and Richard Powers (2023). The address will be live-streamed as part of Commencement weekend festivities.