Jad Abumrad
Jad Abumrad is the creator and former host of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on nearly 600 stations across the nation and has been downloaded more than a billion times and counting.
Abumrad also created and hosted three seasons of More Perfect, a series about the Supreme Court, which the New York Times called “possibly the most mesmerizing podcast.” Other projects include the Vanishing of Harry Pace, Unerased, and Dolly Parton’s America, a Peabody Award-winning 9-part series that explores a divided America through the life and music of one its greatest icons. His podcast Fela Kuti, Fear No Man, about the Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti, was chosen the Best Podcast of 2025 by the New Yorker. It was also chosen as a Best Podcast of 2025 by the New York Times and the Guardian. His audio project Port(al), encompassing two hundred fifty years of American history, was commissioned by Dianne Berkun Menaker and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.
Abumrad employs his dual backgrounds as composer and journalist to create what’s been called “a new aesthetic” in broadcast journalism. He orchestrates dialogue, music, interviews and sounds 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. He’s won three George Foster Peabody Awards, and in 2011 he was honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant). The MacArthur Foundation website says: “Abumrad is 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 April 2022 Abumrad began a joint appointment at Vanderbilt University as a Distinguished Research Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and of Communication of Science and Technology at the College of Arts and Science, and he will have an advisory role with Vanderbilt’s Communications and Marketing team. Both Radiolab and More Perfect are on Time magazine’s list of the 100 Best Podcasts of All Time.