CoAS Annual Distinguished Lecture

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

6:30 PM-8:00 PM

Drexel University College of Arts and Sciences proudly welcomes 2018 Distinguished Lecturer Jad Abumrad, MacArthur Fellow and co-host of the Peabody Award-winning "Radiolab" podcast. Abumrad's lecture, titled "The Miracle of Indoor Plumbing," will be what he calls "a hypertextual lecture with original music."

After 15 years of making "Radiolab" and, more recently, "More Perfect," he found himself standing on a street corner, staring down at a manhole cover and thinking: "Indoor plumbing! Of course!"

Join Abumrad as he deconstructs the process of finding and developing stories and creating new, original work. He'll unearth the hidden ingredients key to the stories that inspire, change and connect us all.

About Jad Abumrad

The son of a scientist and doctor, Abumrad employs his dual backgrounds in journalism and music composition to create what's been called "a new aesthetic" in broadcast journalism. He orchestrates dialogue, music, interviews and sound effects into compelling documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics, such as the nature of numbers, the evolution of altruism, or the legal foundation for the war on terror.

Abumrad's "Radiolab" is a public radio program "where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy and human experience." The program is broadcast on 524 stations across the nation and downloaded more than 9 million times a month as a podcast, making it often the second most popular podcast behind "This American Life."

"Radiolab" was awarded the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award in 2010, and in 2015, received the award again for the episode "60 Words." In 2011, Abumrad was honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant) for "inspiring boundless curiosity within a new generation of listeners and experimenting with sound to find ever more effective and entertaining ways to explain ideas and tell a story." In June 2016, Abumrad premiered a new "Radiolab"spinoff, "More Perfect," a series about untold stories of the Supreme Court.

About the Distinguished Lecture Series

The College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Lecture is free and open to the public. Tickets are now available online.

Abumrad will join the growing list of accomplished CoAS distinguished lecturers, which includes author Sir Salman Rushdie, media maven Arianna Huffington, neuroscientist David Eagleman, religion scholar and author Reza Aslan, designer and urban planner Candy Chang, award-winning novelist Zadie Smith, and biologist Robert Sapolsky, PhD.

Please direct any inquiries regarding the event to Jennifer Yusin at jyusin@drexel.edu.