Nirav Shah will be joining the faculty at Colby College this fall.
It’s the next step for Shah who stepped down last month as the principal deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the Waterville college, Shah will join the department of statistics, where he will teach courses on crisis communication, public health, and epidemics and outbreaks. He also will help Colby develop its public health program, the college announced Thursday morning.
“This is a fantastic opportunity to train the next generation of public health leaders,” Shah said in a statement. “Colby is well positioned to be a national leader in undergraduate public health education, and I’m honored to help play a role.”
READ MORE ABOUT NIRAV SHAH
Colby President David A. Greene called Shah a “natural teacher” with an “extraordinary capacity” to communicate complex issues.
“And that he does so with humor, compassion, and a clear commitment to bettering the lives of others is all the more remarkable,” Greene said Thursday. “He has become one of the world’s leading public health experts, especially in the fields of outbreaks and epidemics. It is Colby’s good fortune that he has decided to join our faculty and help us launch one of the top undergraduate public health programs in the nation.”
Shah quickly became a household name across Maine during the COVID-19 pandemic, with his daily COVID briefings becoming must-watch TV by Mainers anxious to learn the latest developments about the novel virus and its spread.
His memorable analogies, penchant for quoting the British rock band Coldplay, love for Diet Coke and exhortations for Mainers to care for each other generated a devoted fan base not common for public health officials. Mainers created Facebook pages devoted to Shah and T-shirts and other memorabilia emblazoned with the phrase “In Shah We Trust.”
Shah was named the Maine Caregiver of the Year and awarded an honorary degree from Colby in 2022, and he even teased a future run for political office that year, though he maintained he was committed to his role as director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The end of his daily TV briefings in June 2021 marked for some a symbolic step in Maine’s fight against COVID.
MEMORABLE NIRAV SHAH MOMENTS
In 2023, he announced he would be leaving Maine to join the U.S. CDC as its principal deputy director, a role he assumed in March of that year. U.S. Sen. Angus King even floated recommending Shah to lead the CDC in May 2023 when then-Director Rochelle Walensky stepped down.
Shah, who has medical and law degrees from the University of Chicago, came to the Maine CDC after four years of running the Illinois Department of Public Health. Earlier in his career, he worked for the Cambodian Ministry of Health, doing work that included managing disease outbreaks.
He left the Illinois job amid controversy about his handling of a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak — a bacterial infection that causes pneumonia — that sickened 74 people and killed a dozen at a state veterans home. His office did not notify families or the public about the initial outbreak for six days and later declined to cite the facility for a safety violation. The state’s two U.S. senators called for his resignation in late 2018.
