We’re moving to a new venue for the 11th edition of TEDxKids@SMU! Middle school students (6-8th grades) will converge on The Majestic Theatre on March 5 for a day of incredible ideas, jaw-dropping science, and inspiring performances.

TEDxKids@SMU is a one-of-a-kind experience and the first ever TED style conference for kids. Middle school students in 6th, 7th and 8th grade from across North Texas will come to The Majestic Theatre to engage with big ideas and great conversations. This day is dedicated to kids; adults are asked to sit in the balcony while high school volunteer hosts sit with the students on the main floor. During the break, the energy and raw curiosity of 800 young minds all in one room is contagious: ideas are presented on stage then debated with the speakers and partners demonstrate the latest technologies and teach creative expression. The experience is free of charge.

The Majestic Theater
1925 Elm Street
Dallas, Texas, 75201
United States

Amy Ho

Emergency Medicine Physician

Dr. Amy Faith Ho is an emergency medicine physician, writer and speaker. She is currently an associate medical director, core faculty and assistant professor in emergency medicine, where she educates and trains students and residents to have a passion for medicine and patient care. She is an expert in the field and is regularly featured on Medscape, MedPage and national medical conferences. Her passion for patients extends to addressing health care disparities and narrative medicine. She is a nationally published speaker, writer and presenter on these topics, with multiple features through TEDx, Forbes, Chicago Tribune, NPR, Huffington Post, Today Show, and more. Her talent for storytelling and narrative medicine have landed her a role as a featured physician on the TLC and Discovery Life show “Untold Stories of the ER.”

Andrés Ruzo

National Geographic Explorer

Andrés Ruzo is a National Geographic Explorer and host of the award-winning Nat Geo Latin America show, Misterios del Inframundo (Mysteries of the Underworld). His work has been featured across Nat Geo platforms, including the Channel, Magazine, Digital, and other media outlets. He is a geothermal scientist, conservationist, science communicator, and educator who in 2011 became the first geoscientist granted the shamanic blessing to study the sacred Boiling River of the Amazon. He is the founder and director of the Boiling River Project, a non-profit dedicated to understanding and protecting the Boiling River area by bringing together science, traditional Amazonian knowledge, and many other disciplines. He is based between Miami (USA) and Lima (Peru), holds degrees in Geology and Finance, and will soon be receiving his Geoscience Ph.D. (SMU). He is also a TED Main Stage Speaker and TED Book Author and has been featured on numerous major media outlets across the globe.

Artreyo "Dimez" Boyd

NBA 2K League All-Star

Artreyo “Dimez” Boyd is a 24-year-old from Cleveland, Ohio, and was the No. 1 draft pick in the Inaugural 2018 NBA 2K League Draft. Dimez, who has been a competitive 2K player since 2009, is widely regarded as the “LeBron James of NBA 2K,” and coming from Ohio, he accepts this title. He goes by the name “Dimez” due to his innate and creative passing ability, racking up assists all season long. During the inaugural season of the NBA 2K League, Dimez averaged 22.1 points, 11.4 assists and 3.2 steals per game. Dimez is the only returning player for Mavs Gaming in season two and is a natural leader of the team.

Becca Peixotto

Archaeologist

Becca Peixotto is an archaeologist based at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, TX. She earned her Master of Arts and PhD in anthropology from American University in Washington, DC. Her professional journey is full of many adventures including leading wilderness expeditions for Outward Bound and being a costumed historical interpreter at a living history museum. Those threads of the outdoors, history, and her interest in science came together for Becca in archaeology where she explores remote places like swamps and caves to help recover stories of our human past. Her work with five other women archaeologists on the Rising Star Expedition team was featured in a 2-hour PBS Nova special called Dawn of Humanity (2016). Becca is also part of a team investigating African-American resistance to enslavement in the Great Dismal Swamp (VA and NC) which was the focus of a Smithsonian Channel documentary Escape to the Great Dismal Swamp (2018).

Chris Fischer

Shark Specialist

Chris Fischer leads his life through the guiding principle of doing good for the world and including the world in the work. A full-time explorer, Fischer has a special gift of seeing the “big picture,” creating solutions around that picture, and communicating that picture in an accessible way to others. An explorer and disruptor, Chris has led 37 global expeditions focused on accelerating the ocean’s return to balance and abundance, by unlocking the life history puzzle of white sharks and other keystone species through expeditions aboard the OCEARCH.

Corey Clark

Computer Scientist

Dr. Corey Clark serves as Deputy Director of Research at SMU Guildhall, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at SMU as well as CTO of BALANCED Media | Technology. He has over 15 years of experience with a background is finding solutions to large-scale problems by combining several areas of study, such as gaming, systems biology, distributed computing, and artificial intelligence/machine learning. He has raised almost $20MM in research, seed, and series funding from government and private entities as well as served as CTO of a gaming technology startup that was acquired. He has led multiple Advanced DoD R&D projects from concept to commercialization and most recently lead a team to a $2.5MM XPRIZE Grand Prize win. Dr. Clark’s innovations in human-in-the-loop machine learning techniques have led to numerous publications, patents and invitations to speak at top conferences around the world.

Dan Quinn

DJ

After spending over a decade in the tech industry, Dan Quinn finally answered his lifelong calling in music and event entertainment and took the plunge as a full-time musician, DJ, MC, and entertainer in the Dallas area and beyond. With a focus on private events such as weddings, galas, fundraisers, and milestone events, Dan’s calendar was quickly filled with over 100 events per year, and his approach to these events earned him invitations to speak and perform at events across the country-from the NAMM Show in California, to Wedding MBA in Las Vegas, to Industry Events across Texas, to luxury destination events as far away as Costa Rica. And along the way, he became a husband, a stepdad...and then a dad. Seeing the excitement kids had for dance music led him to forming Oontz Kids DJ Academy in the summer of 2016. Originally a nameless summer camp held at a community center, the event quickly sold out and there was a demand for more.

Darian Taylor

SMU Student Body President

Darian Taylor, a senior from Houston, serves as SMU Student Body President. His interest in politics and world affairs and his talent as a communicator are reflected in his double majors in Public Policy in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and Corporate Communications and Public Affairs in Meadows School of the Arts. He is a Hunt Scholar and a member of Beta Upsilon Chi fraternityAmong his wide-ranging campus leadership roles, Taylor has served as the student representative to the SMU Board of Trustee’s Student Affairs Committee; Executive Director of The Big Event at SMU, part of the nation’s largest college student-led community service day; Student Body Secretary; and Orientation Leader for the Office of Student Experience.

Dave Gallo

Oceanographer

David Gallo has been described as an “ambassador between the sea and those of us on dry land”. He has been privileged to be at the forefront of ocean exploration for the past 40 years and has participated in or co-led expeditions to all of the world’s oceans. He was a co-leader in the successful search for missing aircraft Air France 447 and co-led the first mapping expedition to the RMS Titanic. Today David is dedicated to waking up the little bits of Jacques Cousteau and Jules Verne that resides in all of us. The earth is mostly covered by ocean and to date we’ve only explored about 8% of the undersea world. Nearly every voyage into the deep returns with news that is surprising and sometimes revolutionary. David is quick to share the excitement of ocean exploration as well as the importance of understanding the relationship between humanity and the sea.

Ekansh Tambe

Photographer

Ekansh Tambe’s photography chronicles the fence, the culture, and the people he encountered while on an eleven-day journey with his family along most of the 1,900 miles of the US-Mexican land border. As he listened to inspiring and heartbreaking stories, he got a sense of the border situation firsthand, hearing it from the people whose lives have been affected the most. As I listened, the impact the border has on citizens, residents, immigrants, and federal agents began to unfold. Following that trip, Ekansh and his father traveled to the border between North and South Korea in December of 2017. He visited the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the Joint Security Area, a tunnel that North Korea dug to invade the South, and he got a first-hand view of the areas hit by the Korean War near the DMZ.

Joanna Ridgway

Fiddler

June Blount, LLC is a professional fiddle duo founded by Joanna Ridgway and Roberta Rast Smith (formerly of the Killdares) in 2016. Featuring a six-time national fiddle champion /nationally touring fiddler and classically trained violinist, June Blount performs authentic fiddle styles including Texas, bluegrass, old time/country, Celtic, and popular recognizable hits (Beatles, Sinatra, Bob Wills). The duo offers 30+ years of combined performance experience and has played for leading Dallas institutions such as the Business Council for the Arts, Dallas Country Club, Dallas Regional Chamber, Lakewood Country Club and numerous private events in DFW. The duo has provided music education to DISD and the Rise School. June Blount has been featured in Voyage Dallas and provided a TEDx talk at the Bomb Factory for TEDxKids@SMU in November 2016.

Joaquin Zihuatanejo

Joaquín Zihuatanejo is an award winning teacher, an HBO Def Poet, and a World Poetry Slam Champion. Born and raised in the barrio of East Dallas, in his work Joaquin strives to capture the duality of the Chicano culture. Joaquín has been called by critics “one of the most dynamic and passionate performance poets in the country, melding equal parts comedy, poetry, and dramatic monologue into a crowd-pleasing display of verbal fireworks…always thrilling, Joaquín’s hilariously manic presentation is full of compassion and nuance, never sacrificing substance for style, leading many to call him poetry slam’s answer to John Leguizamo.” Joaquín has two passions in his life, his wife Aída and poetry, always in that order.

John Sutter

National Geographic Explorer

John D. Sutter is an EMMY-nominated documentary filmmaker who is directing “Baseline,” a film series that tells the story of the climate crisis beyond a human lifetime. He is an Explorer with the National Geographic Society, where he is developing the “Baseline” project. Sutter spent 10 years as a reporter, columnist and producer at CNN, most recently as a senior investigative reporter. He continues to work for CNN as a climate analyst. Sutter’s work has twice been nominated for an EMMY —for science reporting and new approaches to documentary. He is the recipient of the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, the Peabody Award, the Batten Medal for Public Service, the Foreign Press Association Media Award and the Edward R. Murrow Award, among others. He’s a former fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and at Union Docs, a center for documentary art in Brooklyn.

Roberta Rast Smith

Fiddler

June Blount, LLC is a professional fiddle duo founded by Joanna Ridgway and Roberta Rast Smith (formerly of the Killdares) in 2016. Featuring a six-time national fiddle champion /nationally touring fiddler and classically trained violinist, June Blount performs authentic fiddle styles including Texas, bluegrass, old time/country, Celtic, and popular recognizable hits (Beatles, Sinatra, Bob Wills). The duo offers 30+ years of combined performance experience and has played for leading Dallas institutions such as the Business Council for the Arts, Dallas Country Club, Dallas Regional Chamber, Lakewood Country Club and numerous private events in DFW. The duo has provided music education to DISD and the Rise School. June Blount has been featured in Voyage Dallas and provided a TEDx talk at the Bomb Factory for TEDxKids@SMU in November 2016.

Veronica Whitehead

Sex Educator

Veronica Ray Whitehead, M.Ed., CHES, is a reproductive justice advocate and a sexual health educator. Currently she serves as the Director of Programs at the North Texas Alliance to Reduce Unintended Pregnancy in Teens (Ntarupt). In this role she oversees sexual health education programs for parents, adolescents and youth-serving with the goal of changing the stigma around talking about sex. Veronica is a Certified Health Education Specialist with an emphasis in promotion, education and advocacy related reproductive health education and healthcare access. She believes inclusive, trauma informed comprehensive sexual health education and healthcare access is basic human right of all people. She is a current Movement Mujeres fellow and a United States of Women Ambassador representing North Texas. Veronica did here undergraduate work at Texas A&M University, graduate studies at Texas State University and is a group fitness instructor at Dallas Grit Fitness.