James H. Ottaway Sr. Professor of Journalism to give talk April 1

Science journalist Sonia Shah, the 2014 James H. Ottaway Sr. Professor of Journalism at the State University of New York at New Paltz, will give a public talk, titled “The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years,” on Tuesday, April 1, at 7 p.m., in the Coykendall Science Building auditorium on the New Paltz campus.

The event is free and open to the public. A reception and book signing will follow.

Shah is the author of several critically acclaimed and prize-winning books, including “The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years,” (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July 2010) based on five years of original reportage in Cameroon, Malawi, Panama and elsewhere, “The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients” (New Press, 2006), and “Crude: The Story of Oil” (Seven Stories Press, 2004). She is also the editor of the anthology “Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire” (South End Press, 1997).

A former writing fellow of the Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation, Shah is a frequent keynote speaker, and has lectured at universities and colleges across the country. Her writings on science, global health, and politics have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Scientific American, and Foreign Affairs, among other publications. Her work has been supported by The Nation Investigative Fund and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

Shah was born in 1969 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 and the role of science and medicine in modern life.

Shah joined the SUNY New Paltz journalism faculty in spring 2014 to teach a journalism seminar called “Science, Environment, and Disease: New Approaches to Science Journalism.” She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience from Oberlin College.

About the Professorship
The James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professorship, SUNY New Paltz’s only endowed professorship, is named for the founder of Ottaway Newspapers Inc., now the Dow Jones Local Media Group, which operates print and online community media franchises in seven states. The flagship newspaper of the chain is the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y. For more information, visit http://www.newpaltz.edu/ottaway/.