In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized (subject to certain rules and regulations).

Palo Alto High School (Haymarket Theater)
50 Embarcadero Road
Palo Alto, California, 94303
United States

Calvin Lu and Samantha Nguyen

Calvin and Samantha both started dancing at UC Berkeley, where they quickly fell in love with the fun, energetic swing dance that is Lindy Hop. Starting their dance careers in Cal’s gender-neutral and “ambidancetrous” dance scene, the two learned to dance as both leaders and followers. Now more involved in the Lindy community than ever, you can find these recent grads teaching together, competing, and working to shift the dance community away from the paradigm where men must lead and women must follow.

Gunn Bhangra

Gunn Bhangra is a school club at Gunn High School in Palo Alto that is open to all. Founded in 2015, the club was created to promote Bhangra, a folk dance from Punjab, India. Known for it’s high energy and colorful costumes, it is fun to both dance and watch.

Andrew Dong

Andrew Dong is the Junior Class Vice President and Site Council Representative at Gunn High School. Through his work, Andrew noticed the limitations of the widely accepted introvert-extrovert personality type system, and how stereotypes surrounding the system have affected individual and team-performance.

Chiara Sabatti

Chiara grew up in Italy, where she attended Liceo Classico Arnaldo in Brescia, and obtained a master degree in "Economics and Social Sciences" (DES) from the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan in 1993. Her final research project was on applications of finite exchangeability to population sampling, and was supervised by Eugenio Regazzini. In the same year, she was awarded a Bocconi Fellowship for advanced studies. She came to Stanford in 1994 to pursue a PhD in Statistics, and worked with Jun Liu on multiscale MCMC methods. Between 1998 and 2000 she was a post-doctoral scholar with Neil Risch in the Department of Genetics, also at Stanford. In 2000 she joined the faculty at UCLA in the newly established departments of Human Genetics and Statistics. She received the NSF Career award in 2003. After 9 happy years in sunny southern California, she came back north with her family and currently lives and works at Stanford.

Ebbie Banks

Ebbie Banks is currently a senior at Gunn High School. He is a spoken word poet, and he finds his “second home” on the stage. He thinks that performance poetry is a great way for people to tell their stories, and listening to performance poetry is a great way for people to hear others’ stories. He believes that through sharing your own story through poetry, and listening to others’ stories through poetry, we can collectively expand our capacity for empathy.

Isha Gupta

Isha Gupta is a senior at Henry M. Gunn High School. She has been an active participant in the world of Model United Nations for nearly six years. Isha has attended numerous conferences across the nation with both the League of Creative Minds and Gunn High School Model UN teams and recently just completed a two year stint as USG of Training for the latter. She is now the club president for the Gunn Model UN team and a teaching assistant in the League of Creative Minds. Besides Model UN, she is also a flutist in the Gunn High School Wind Ensemble and the Co-Editor-in-Chief for The Chariot, Gunn's premier political magazine. In her free time, she enjoys reading, listening to music, hanging out with friends, and binge watching The West Wing.

Jill Ranes

Jill Ranes grew up in the Bay Area. After being rescued from a horrendous crime that lasted a total 18 years of her life, she founded the “Out of Egypt Network.” Jill has facilitated a healing curriculum for victims of abuse and was a licensed minister for 10 years. She served on a Coalition to End Human Trafficking for 7 years all the while building an organization of her own to counteract slavery and organized sexual assault crimes.

Kartik Chandra

Kartik Chandra is a senior at Henry M. Gunn High School. When not hacking or teaching others how to hack, he can be found blogging about anything from jazz to bubble tea.

Lily Liu

Lily Liu is a Junior at Gunn High School. She has been playing the Chinese Zither (GuZheng) since she was eight years old and has received the highest level of music degree from the China Conservatory of Music in 2016. She has been competing in multiple local and worldwide competitions since 2012, placing top three in competitions such as San Francisco Youth Talent, Silicon Valley Music Competition, and International Music Competitions.

Lisa Van Dusen

Lisa Van Dusen sparks social change through civic engagement, entrepreneurship, stories and art. As Chief Relationship Officer at Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund (SV2), she currently leads SV2’s impact investing efforts, strategic relationships and partner engagement. Throughout her life, however, Lisa has worked in a wide spectrum of fields -- from creating pioneering Silicon Valley communications platforms in pre-Internet era Palo Alto, introducing broadband technology through Cable Co-op, leading the award-winning Palo Alto Online, to being an active civic leader throughout the Bay Area. Having been recognized as a Silicon Valley Woman of Influence, Lisa’s journey highlights her curiosity and creativity.

Shirley Zhang

Shirley Zhang is a Junior at Gunn High School. She is a student poet, and uses spoken word to both discuss controversial or otherwise difficult to talk about issues and express herself. Her favorite quote about poetry is: "A poet's autobiography is his or her poetry. Everything else is simply a footnote.”

Vishu Sikka

Vishu Sikka is a Junior at Gunn High School. Although a special needs student, Vishu is an optimist and has learned to focus on his strengths. Armed with a strong desire to learn and with sheer hard work, Vishu is determined to do better every day and not be deterred by failures. In his free time, Vishu likes to listen to music, play the piano, travel and he loves German cars.