Sheila B. Lalwani

Sheila B. Lalwani is a doctoral student at the Moody College of Communication with years of experience reporting on human rights, politics and society as a full-time journalist. She graduated with a B.A. (honors) in Journalism and Religious Studies from Indiana University and earned a Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where she also studied human rights law at Harvard Law School. She earned her LL.M. in Legal Theory (magna cum laude) from Goethe University. Sheila began reporting professionally at 15 and served as a staff writer for the Seattle Times, Associated Press and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She reported on human rights from Austria as the inaugural fellow for the U.S.-Austria Journalism Exchange through the International Center for Journalists and from Germany as a John J. McCloy Journalism Fellow through the American Council of Germany. She has also reported on human rights from Thailand, India, Indonesia and Singapore. She earned a fellowship from the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard to help lead the human rights portfolio for the U.S. Department in New Delhi and researched human rights in Germany for a year as a Fulbright Scholar in which she also taught a course on human rights and media.

An honoree of the Graduate School Mentoring Fellowship, she researches comparative media law and policy and has been awarded fellowships for summer research. A cyber security student fellow, she served as a panelist for the Oxford Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy in summer 2022 and has been honored by the Overseas Press Club and Society of Professional Journalists.