On June 28, 2021, Courtney Shah stepped up to a lit Jeopardy! podium and started clearing categories in a subject she had spent fourteen years teaching. She did not stop for seven games, and she came back the following year for the Tournament of Champions. Dr. Shah, a history professor at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington, for nearly two decades, died on July 22, 2026, at 52.

Shah's run on Season 37 brought in $118,558 over seven straight wins, plus $2,000 for a second place finish in the game that ended her streak, according to the Portland Tribune. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and CNN contributor, was the guest host presiding over her games that summer. She returned in November 2022 for the Tournament of Champions, where she reached the quarterfinals before losing to John Focht and collecting another $5,000. "It's every bit as intense as you can think it can be," she told the Tribune ahead of the tournament, describing a different kind of preparation than her original run: "it's a fine balance of study but don't drive myself bonkers."

Long before television audiences knew her, Shah had built an academic career around the history of gender, sexuality, medicine and race. She earned a bachelor's degree in gender, sexuality and feminist studies from Duke University in 1996, then a Ph.D. in history from the University of Houston in 2006, where her dissertation examined sex education in Progressive-Era America under adviser Landon Storrs. Her book, "Sex Ed, Segregated: The Quest for Sexual Knowledge in Progressive-Era America," was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2015, followed by a co-authored second edition of "America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1917" in 2021.

Shah joined the Lower Columbia College faculty in 2007, teaching U.S. and World History for nearly twenty years. She coordinated the college's Community Conversations program and served as a keynote speaker during LCC's 90th anniversary celebration, according to KLOG. Former students posted tributes after her death describing lessons from her classes that stayed with them long after they graduated.

A 1992 graduate of Sunset High School, Shah made her home in Northwest Portland, Oregon. She had watched Jeopardy! with her family for years before she ever competed, and she studied old episodes featuring Ken Jennings to prepare for her own run, the Portland Tribune reported.

Shah died on July 22, 2026, at her home. Her daughter, Maya Shaw, announced the death on the family's CaringBridge page, writing, "I don't know what you believe about death, but I like to think that she's at peace now. We loved her in this world, and we loved her out of this world, and we'll go on loving her," as AOL reported alongside tributes from the Lower Columbia College community. A memorial service celebrating Shah's life is scheduled for August 10, 2026, from 1 to 3:30 p.m. at LCC's Rose Center for the Arts.

Two things persist from Shah's two very different public lives: the history syllabus built from her research into gender and sexuality, and the trivia record of a professor who turned a lifelong habit of studying into seven straight wins on national television. Her book stands as part of the scholarly literature on Progressive-Era sex education, the Community Conversations program she built during nineteen years on the LCC faculty is part of what she gave the college, and her daughter Maya, who spoke for the family after her death, asked everyone reading her words to hug the people they love.