Before she became a Guggenheim Fellow and a leading voice on pandemics, migration, and the environment, Sonia Shah ’90 was a student at Oberlin. Thirty-five years later, she returned to campus to deliver a powerful commencement address, reminding us of our interconnectedness with the natural world around us.In this episode of Running to the Noise, Oberlin College President Carmen Twillie Ambar revisits her conversation with Shah, exploring how her reporting confronts long-held assumptions about science, health, and humanity’s place in the world. From the history of malaria cures and the hidden biases of animal testing to the overlooked intelligence of dolphins, trees, and microbes, Shah pushes us to see our entanglement with other species in ways that could reshape medicine, policy, and our politics.As season two comes to a close, this timely episode reminds us why Oberlin voices like Shah’s are needed now more than ever, voices unafraid to challenge orthodoxy, translate complexity, and speak truth to power.What We Cover in this EpisodeA Return to Oberlin: Shah reflects on her journey back to campus 35 years after graduating, and why Oberlin remains central to her voice as a truth-teller.Pandemics in Context: From malaria to COVID-19, Shah reframes outbreaks as products of human behavior, inequality, and environmental exploitation, not just “foreign germs.”The Myth of Human Exceptionalism: Why her forthcoming book Special: The Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea challenges the widely held belief that humans are superior to other species.Language Beyond Humans: The surprising ways dolphins, birds, and other species communicate, and what that means for how we measure intelligence.Animal Testing Under Scrutiny: How hidden biases in lab studies, from who handles mice to how they’re housed, expose flaws in drug development and biomedical research.Microbes as Kin: Why thinking of microbes and animals as “invaders” blinds us to their role as long-term partners in evolution and survival.Running to the Noise: How Shah steps outside her comfort zone, from canvassing swing states to challenging scientific orthodoxy, in order to confront polarization and defend democracy.

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