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).

MIT Media Lab
77 Mass Ave
Boston, Massachusetts, 02139
United States

Alay Shah

I'm a 19 year old who's been studying the human brain for 6 years. The bulk of my work focuses on investigating new biomarkers in an effort to understand complex elements of human cognition and brain health. My most recent published work explored using eye-tracking technology as a gateway into neurological disorders such as Parkinson's, Dementia, and Multiple Sclerosis, featured in the Human Brain Project. Now, I'm working on translating cutting-edge research into tools that enable a new era of personal brain health built for consumers.

Alexander More

Alexander More is a climate and health scientist. He is Associate Professor of Environmental Health at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Associate Research Professor at the Climate Change Institute (UMaine) and Group Leader for climate & health at SoHP at Harvard University, where he earned his PhD. With projects spanning four continents, Dr. More uses cutting-edge tools and a center for science communications (ECHO) to engage the public in the realities of climate change and the quest for solutions to it. He leads a project on the impact of environmental change on human and ecosystem health and the economy. Dr. More combines natural, archaeological, economic and public health data in landmark articles and interviews featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Guardian, Popular Science, Natural History Magazine, and more than 150 other print and online publications worldwide. He is founder and director of ECHO (Environmental Center for Climate Change Communications, Conservation, Health and Ocean research), which connects scientists to a select network of high-level press contacts, amplifying the impact of new discoveries. Dr. More served as a staffer in the U.S. Senate office of Sen. Ted Kennedy while he was drafting the Affordable Care Act. He a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and The Explorers Club, and a former fellow of The Theodore Roosevelt Institute (LIU) and Dumbarton Oaks Research Center (Harvard), and former Managing Director of the World Ocean Forum. All his published data is freely available to the public, and also displayed on Harvard MAPS, a groundbreaking, Google-maps-like website that overlaps ultra-high-resolution environmental, health, and economic big data in maps that use AI and machine learning to find trends humans could never see. Raised in southern Italy and Greece in the early part of his life, Dr. More moved permanently to New York City on his own to complete his secondary education. He attended college in Chicago and eventually Washington University in St. Louis. He continued his studies in an interdisciplinary PhD program at Harvard University, where he earned multiple teaching awards and where he has conducted research for the past 16 years. He lives in Hull, Massachusetts.

Alexis Krauss

Alexis is a longtime lover of the outdoors and teaching. Alexis has been guiding adventures in the outdoors since 2016 and especially loves sharing the transformative power of nature with youth. She is an outdoor educator for Wild Earth and a Wilderness First Responder. An avid climber, she is an American Mountain Guide Association Single Pitch Instructor and a NYS licensed climbing and hiking guide. She is a co-founder of Young Women Who Crush, a climbing and leadership program for New York City girls and gender-expansive youth. She is a co-founder of Rise Outside Collective, a New York based 501c3 dedicated to diversifying the outdoors. Alexis is a working musician and one half of the band Sleigh Bells.

Alison Sander

Alison serves as the Director of BCG’s Center for Sensing and Mining the Future and brings more than 25 years’ experience working with senior management teams on complex challenges. The Center develops BCG’s global Megatrend databases and provides guidance to companies and organizations seeking to better understand trends that will shape their future. The Center tracks more than 100 trends that cut across the latest technological developments, demographic shifts, environmental shifts, economic requirements, and consumer shifts, among others. BCG's Megatrend knowledge has been used by more than 1,200 organizations. Alison has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a BA in political science with honors from the University of Chicago. Prior to BCG Alison gained experience at Cambridge Transnational Associates (Founder & CEO), and Goldman Sachs. Alison served for 11 years on the Board of the World Resources Institute (www.wri.org), served as a member of the Technical Advisory Committee for two NREL teams, and served on the Steering Committee for the Antarctic 2023 Sylvia Earle Mission Blue Climate Expedition among other organizations.

Björn Lütjens

Björn Lütjens is a PhD Candidate at MIT. His research is tackling climate change with machine learning, little-by-little, together with Prof. D. Newman, C. Crawford, and C. Hill. He aims to break down access barriers to city-scale forecasts of climate risks--using machine learning and physics-based models. He also crochets, windsurfs poorly, and loves meeting new people--you're no exception--please don't hesitate to reach out at lutjens at mit [dot] edu.

Carl Page

Philanthropist and Entrepreneur focused on Restoring Climate by Empowering Spaceship Earth's Engineering Department.

Carmichael Roberts

Carmichael Roberts is, co-founder and managing partner of Material Impact, a venture fund that builds resilient technology companies developing products to solve real-world problems using innovative materials. Material Impact companies collectively have a mission to keep the world healthy, safe, fed, warm, powered, and secure. Carmichael’s strategy as a venture investor is partly based on his entrepreneurial experience building companies and commercializing university-based technology in partnership with Fortune 500 companies. Carmichael serves as Vice Chairman of the Duke University Board of Trustees. Carmichael also serves on the boards for the Consumer Technology Association, WGBH, and Massachusetts General Hospital Physicians Organization. Carmichael is also a Finance Leaders Fellow with the Aspen Institute. Carmichael received his BS and PhD in organic chemistry from Duke University and completed his postdoctoral National Science Foundation fellowship at Harvard University. He also has an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Caroline Spears

Caroline Spears is the Executive Director of Climate Cabinet, which helps candidates run, win and legislate on the climate crisis. Climate Cabinet has built the largest database of climate and political action in the country, and uses this to create climate wins at every level of government. Caroline has been recognized as a Grist 50 “Fixer,” on CNN, and as part of the New Media Ventures 2020 Cohort. Before Climate Cabinet Action she worked in the solar industry, and has a B.S. and M.S. in Atmosphere and Energy Engineering from Stanford University.

Chris MacAskill

M.S. Geophysics, Stanford. VP R&D Western Geophysical, a large global tech company. Tech exec in Silicon Valley. YouTuber.

Christine Harada

"Biden-Harris Administration Presidential appointee Christine Harada serves as the Executive Director of the Permitting Council. As Executive Director, Harada assists Permitting Council member agencies in managing a portfolio of nearly $100 billion in large-scale infrastructure projects—most of which are renewable energy, coastal restoration, and electricity transmission projects. She assists Federal agencies in developing and implementing comprehensive, project-specific timetables for all required infrastructure permitting reviews and authorizations for certain infrastructure projects, advancing the administration's infrastructure agenda and the nationwide transition to a clean energy economy. Formerly the President of i(x) investments, an impact investing company, Harada has served in various executive-level roles in the private sector. Under President Barack Obama, Harada served as the Federal Chief Sustainability Officer, and as the Acting Chief of Staff and the Associate Administrator of Government-wide Policy and Chief Acquisition Officer at the U.S. General Services Administration. "

Craig Ratajczyk

Craig Ratajczyk is the Chief Executive Officer of Crop One, a technology-driven indoor vertical farming company on a mission to cultivate a sustainable future to meet a global demand for fresh, local, and safe food. Craig possesses extensive c-suite experience and global perspective, bringing expertise in strategy, financial-organization management, stakeholder engagement, governance, advocacy and leading complex global organizations. Agriculture is at the core of his proficiencies as Mr. Ratajczyk dedicated over two decades to the global industry. He was previously CEO of the Illinois Soybean Association (ISA) where he was responsible for managing the $40 million organization and its 200 employees, representing 43,000 soybean farmer members. During his tenure with ISA, he improved efficiency in business and strategic operations, namely implementing advanced technology solutions and aligning the organization with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to his position at the ISA, Ratajczyk served as Director of Global Issues and Alliances for the U.S. Soybean Export Council Inc., as well as division director, Western Hemisphere, Europe, Africa, Middle East, CIS, for the American Soybean Association. He’s also a Retired U.S. Navy Intelligence Commander, leaving the branch in 2012 after over 28 years of service. Mr. Ratajczyk received his BA from Southern Illinois University, MBA from Thunderbird – American Graduate School of International Management and is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program (AMP).

Cully Cavness

Cully is the Co-Founder, President and Chief Operating Officer of Crusoe Energy Systems LLC. He is an energy industry professional with a passion for innovative environmental solutions. Prior to co-founding Crusoe, Cully served in leadership and management positions in the upstream oil & gas industry and geothermal energy industry as well as in energy investment banking. Cully holds an undergraduate degree in geology from Middlebury College, an MBA from the University of Oxford and is a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in the subject of energy economics. Cully was named as a 2021 Entrepreneur of the Year by EY, and has won numerous awards for leadership as well as environmental and technology innovation.

Daniel Kleinman

Daniel Kleinman is the Founder and CEO of Seaworthy Collective and Seaworthy Foundation, and a marine roboticist. Daniel received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from University of Florida, and a Master of Professional Science in Exploration Science from University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. As an undergraduate, Daniel interned with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and became versed in design and systems thinking as a University Innovation Fellow. After graduating in 2015, Daniel started his career as a pilot and test engineer for Bluefin Robotics' unmanned underwater vehicles in Boston. Daniel then served as a Navy contractor and mechanical engineer for maritime systems in San Diego. In 2020, Daniel launched Seaworthy Collective and Seaworthy Foundation in Miami to break the silos he experienced in industry by supporting changemakers addressing the ocean’s greatest problems. Daniel also serves as an advisor for Opportunity Miami and The Shrimp Society, a steering committee member for Ocean Visions’ Global Ecosystem for Ocean Solutions, and a member of The Explorers Club and Global Shapers Miami. Daniel has been recognized as a Miami Ambassador for SDG 14, a 30 Under 30 by University of Miami, and a Future Climate Leader by The Aspen Institute.

David Des Marais

David L. Des Marais is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Dave is a plant biologist working at the interface of molecular biology, ecophysiology, evolution, and quantitative genetics. He received a BA in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley before completing doctoral research at Duke University where his dissertation work contributed to our understanding of the evolutionary constraints acting on multi-function enzymes. Dave began focusing on plant ecophysiology, particularly plant-water relations, while a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Dave received a USDA NIFA fellowship for his post-doctoral research addressing the interactive effects of plant response to multivariate environments. His research over the past ten years has extended these themes, specifically addressing how plants perceive, integrate, and respond to complex environmental cues at the cellular and whole-plant scale. Current topics of interest include the regulatory control of stress response, resource partitioning in fluctuating environments, and the interaction between genetics and the environment as plant populations respond to anthropogenic climate change. A central theme of the Des Marais Lab is understanding the mechanisms and consequences of genotype-by-environment interaction, the widely observed phenomenon that different varieties of a single species respond differently to common environmental cues.

Desiree Plata

Desirée Plata’s research seeks to maximize technology’s benefit to society while minimizing environmental impacts in industrially important practices through the use of geochemical tools and chemical mechanistic insights. Plata earned her doctoral degree in Chemical Oceanography and Environmental Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Joint Program in Oceanography (2009) and her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Union College in Schenectady, NY (2003). Plata is an NSF CAREER Awardee (2016), an Odebrecht-Braskem Sustainable Innovation Awardee (2015), a two-time National Academy of Engineers Frontiers of Engineering Fellow (2012, 2020), a two-time National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow (2011, 2013), a Caltech Resnick Sustainability Fellow (2017), and winner of MIT’s Junior Bose Teaching Award (2019), Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award (2021), and Perkins Graduate Mentor Award (2022). Having previously served as John J. Lee Assistant Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale University and Associate Director for Research at the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale, Plata is now Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Plata is co-founder of Nth Cycle, a sustainable metal processing and recycling firm.

Donald Pettit

Donald R. Pettit was selected by NASA in 1996. The Silverton, Oregon native holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Oregon State University and a Doctorate in Chemical Engineering from the University of Arizona. Prior to becoming an astronaut, he worked as a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico. A veteran of three spaceflights, Pettit served as NASA Science Officer for Expedition 6 in 2003, operated the robotic arm for STS-126 in 2008 and served as a Flight Engineer for Expedition 30/31 in 2012, where he lived aboard the International Space Station for more than one year.

Edward Adelson

Edward Adelson is the John and Dorothy Professor of Vision Science in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) at MIT. Formerly a vision scientist, he now works on artificial touch sensing for robots. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Erica Duignan Minnihan

Erica Duignan Minnihan is Founder and General Partner at Reign Ventures, a Seed Stage Venture fund that invests in consumer tech and software startups with underrepresented founders. Erica has been an active investor in and advisor to early-stage companies for over 15 years. Before launching Reign, she was Founding Partner of 1000 Angels, Managing Director at DreamIt Ventures and Executive Director at both STAR Angel Network and Golden Seeds. Prior to beginning a career in venture, she practiced Investment Banking at Citigroup, Credit Suisse and Cantor Fitzgerald. Erica earned her BA in Business Economics from UCLA and an MBA in Finance with honors from Columbia Business School. She has also made regular appearances on MSNBC and CNBC on “App Wars”, ""Your Business"" and ""Crowd Rules"" as a startup investor. She is a mother of three and lives with her family in New York City.

Erin Baker

Erin Baker is Distinguished Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and the Faculty Director of the Energy Transition Institute, which is focused on stakeholder-engaged research at the intersection of energy technology and social equity. She has a Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems & Operations Research from the department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, and a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from U.C. Berkeley. She applies operations research and economics to decision making under uncertainty, with a focus on Energy Justice and publicly-funded energy technology Research & Development portfolios in the face of climate change.

Frank Ling

Frank Hiroshi Ling is Chief Scientist at the Anthropocene Institute. He is also a guest lecturer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Ibaraki University, and was previously a research fellow at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and University of Tokyo. Dr. Ling has consulted for various US and Asian organizations, including the Asian Development Bank (ADB), CLSA, SELC Japan, and Jane Capital Partners. His work has been cited in the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C. He is producer and host of the science podcast “Groks Science”. Frank is the editor of the book “Climate Smart Development in Asia: Transition to Low Carbon, Climate Resilient Economies” and a contributing author to the publication "The Energy Revolution Will Save Japan". Dr. Ling received his PhD in Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley and his BS in Chemical Engineering at Caltech and his MS at University of California at Santa Barbara.

Glenn Weinreb

Director of Manhattan 2, a 501c3 non-profit that does research on climate change solutions. Also founder of GW Instruments, a manufacturer of computer hardware and software products that automate factories and research laboratories. Weinreb founded this company in 1976 at age 12, and later expanded it while an electrical engineering student at MIT.

Greg Kats

Greg is Founder and CEO of the Smart Surfaces Coalition, comprising 40 organization committed to transforming urban surfaces to slow climate change, cool cities and address EJ issues. He served as Managing Director of Good Energies, a several billion-dollar global clean energy PE/VC fund investing in renewable energy and low carbon firms. Greg served for 5 years as the Director of Financing for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the US Department of Energy. He is a founder of both the American Council on Renewable Energy and the country’s first green bank. Greg received the first US Green Building Council Lifetime Achievement Award, is an honorary lifetime member of the AIA, and is the author of Greening our Built World.

Gregor Semieniuk

Gregor Semieniuk is an Assistant Research Professor of Economics at the Political Economy Research Institute and the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on the energy and resource requirements of global economic growth and on the political economy of rapid, policy-induced structural change that is required for the transition to a low-carbon economy. Gregor has published on these topics including in Nature Climate Change and Nature Energy, consulted for the United Nations Environment Program, the European Commission and the UK government, and won grants to study policies inducing investments into renewable energy supply as well as the risks for financial investors from stranded assets in a fast transition to a low-carbon economy. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research.

Heather White

Heather White, who consumer advocate Erin Brockovich calls the "Brené Brown of the environmental movement," is the author of One Green Thing: Discover Your Hidden Power to Help Save the Planet (Harper Collins 2022). Heather's two decades of experience in climate policy and environmental advocacy include serving as a presidential campaign staffer to Al Gore, the environmental counsel to U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, and the executive director of three national environmental nonprofits. She's a frequent spokesperson on climate and environmental issues and has been featured on Good Morning America, CBS, and NBC, and quoted in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian. Her two Gen Z daughters inspired her to research and write about the mental health impacts of the climate crisis. The nonprofit organization she founded, onegreenthing.org, tackles eco-anxiety through joyful daily action, leading to culture change for climate solutions. She lives in Bozeman, Montana.

Heidi Bialk

Board certified toxicologist with a breadth of experience in the Commercial, Foods and Consumer Products sectors. Passionate about creating positive change, partnering and learning from others, and communicating science in meaningful ways. A writer at heart.

Hilary Vogelbaum

Hilary has been dedicated to promoting systems-level solutions in clean energy ever since discovering the interconnectedness of energy and the climate crisis during a middle school research project. Her clean energy adventure so far has led her into corporate strategy at energy supermajors, securing revenue for large-scale renewable projects, hands-on energy research from the lab bench to computer models, creating net-zero communities in Scotland, and now investing flexible capital across leading energy transition companies. Hilary is a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in Materials Science & Engineering with concentration in Business & Energy and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi honors societies. She lives in Boston and is most often found anywhere there is delicious vegetarian food or chocolate.

Jan-Georg Rosenboom

Dr. Rosenboom is a Polymer Scientist at MIT, plastic sustainability consultant and co-founder of a plastic recycling startup. At MIT, he works with Prof. Robert Langer and Prof. Giovanni Traverso on polymer technologies for plastic recycling and drug delivery. He has a PhD from ETH Zurich where he developed polymerization processes based on Ring-Opening Polymerization.

Jasmina Aganovic

Jasmina is a cosmetics industry professional who is driving innovation in beauty. As the CEO of Arcaea, she leverages the power of expressive biology to create a new wave of beauty products that provide consumers with innovative and sustainably sourced ingredients. Prior to launching Arcaea, she was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Ginkgo Bioworks and the President of Mother Dirt, a skin microbiome brand that developed the first live probiotic and biome-friendly products for the skin. Jasmina has a degree in chemical and biological engineering from MIT.

Jason Petralia

Mission driven impact investor, technologist and entrepreneur obsessed with reducing the impacts of the climate emergency. Jason is currently CEO of climate technology startup Anthropogenic Inc, creators of the world's first RestAPI for open source GHG emissions data and the developer of climate-linked financial platform, Scope6. Jason brings a track record of next gen technology launches and multiple successful exits including the first mobile Esports IPO and award winning technology innovator Raizlabs/Rightpoint. Jason graduated from Tulane University and studied business at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

Jeffrey Hoffman

Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman is a professor in MIT’s Aeronautics and Astronautics Department, with research interests in improving the technology of space suits, in ISRU, and in designing innovative space systems for human and robotic space exploration. As a NASA astronaut (1978-1997) Dr. Hoffman made five space flights, including the initial rescue/repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, and became the first astronaut to log 1000 hours of flight time aboard the Space Shuttle. Dr. Hoffman is director of the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium and is Deputy Principal Investigator of the Mars2020 MOXIE experiment, which is producing oxygen on the surface of Mars. In 2007, Dr. Hoffman was elected to the US Astronaut Hall of Fame.

Jemila MacEwan

Jemila MacEwan is known for their intimately interwoven earthworks, created through slow acts of physical endurance and meditation. MacEwan cultivates kinships with landscapes and their communities of indwellers, regarding them as true collaborators who carry their own valid subjectivities, histories, and messages. MacEwan's work is empathetic to the psychological pressure of trying to reach into the past to regain control of a future fraught with uncertainty. MacEwan has performed and exhibited extensively internationally including; ARoS Museum (Denmark), The Australian Consulate-General (NYC), Pioneer Works (NYC), The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NYC), NYCXDESIGN (USA), Skaftfell Center for Visual Art (Iceland) and The Castlemaine State Festival (Australia). They have been invited to attend many residencies notably; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (USA) BANFF Center (Canada), NARS Foundation (NYC), and Ox-Bow School of Painting (MI). Their work has been published in Art in America, SFMoMA Open Space, MONDO Arc and Artist Profile Magazine. MacEwan has been generously supported by The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Australia Council for the Arts, City Artist Corps, The Dame Joan Sutherland Fund, The Ian Potter Cultural Council and is a recipient of The Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship.

Jiabao Li

Jiabao Li creates works addressing climate change, interspecies world sharing, humane technology, and a just, sustainable future. Her mediums include wearable, robot, AR/VR, projection, performance, software, and installation. She is a member of NEW INC Creative Science at the New Museum. In Jiabao’s TED Talk, she uncovered how technology mediates the way we perceive reality. Jiabao is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Her lab explores the intersection of art, design, technology, and biology. The interests are broadly spanning from interspecies co-creation to knowledge graph, from Biosensors to menstrual blood proteomes. She is co-founder and chief product officer of Peregrine Biosense and previously of Snapi Health. She serves on juries for major design awards such as IDSA, D&AD, Biodesign Challenge, etc. Jiabao is the recipient of numerous awards, including iF Design Award, AACYF 30 Under 30, Falling Walls, National Endowment for the Arts, STARTS Prize, Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award, Core77, IDSA, A’ Design Award, Webby Award, Cannes World Film Festival Best VR short award. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at Ars Electronica, Today Art Museum Biennale, Anchorage Museum, Currents New Media Gallery, Milan and Dubai Design Week, Shanghai Ming Contemporary Museum, ISEA, OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, CHI, Donghu Shan Art Museum, MOOD Museum of Design, Alaska State Museum. Her academic papers have been published in top conferences and journals such as SIGGRAPH, CHI, IEEE VIS, and Nature sub-journals. She has been featured in Fast Company, Art Forum, Business Insider, Bloomberg, CCTV, Yahoo, South China Morning Post, TechCrunch, Domus, Yanko Design, Harvard Political Review, The National, Arab News, Leonardo, iF World Design Guide, Exceptional ALIEN. Hung Huang, China’s Oprah, featured Jiabao's work in her 2020 TED interview ""How American and Chinese values shaped the coronavirus response."" Jiabao graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Master of Design in Technology with Distinction and Thesis Award. She holds a bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the National University of Singapore.

John Werner

John Werner has created a career out of bringing ideas, networks and people together to generate powerful results. Currently, John serves as Managing Director and Partner at Link Ventures. Before joining Link Ventures, John's deep curiosity and penchant for problem-solving led him to a diverse set of roles spanning many fields and interests. Previously, John was a VP at Meta, a Y-Combinator augmented reality startup based in Silicon Valley. John's also served as the Head of Innovation and New Ventures at the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture Group, and the Managing Director of Emerging Worlds SIG, where he led the launch of collaborative innovation centers in Mumbai, Nashik, and Hyderabad. John channels his passion and curiosity into cultivating platforms for thought and exchange. He is the Founder & CEO of ARIA, a community focused on the potential of augmented reality and the Blockchain+AI+Human, now called Imagination in Action, which takes place at the World Economic Forum in Davos and at MIT with MIT Professor Sandy Pentland. John is also the cofounder of TEDxMIT and founded Ideas in Action Inc., a non-profit that creates and produces TEDxBeaconStreet, whose talks have accumulated 300+ million YouTube views. John is also the co-Founder of Citizen Schools, an advisor for Everquote, Brelyon, PhotoButler, Vestigo Ventures and Founders Forum (Boston), an MIT Connection Science Fellow, a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and a graduate of Hamilton College. John was recognized by Harvard Business Review for his leadership; by BostonInno in 2014 as a top 50 on Fire in Boston; Boston Chamber with a TOYL (Ten Outstanding Young Leaders) Award in 2006. In his free time, John is a passionate photographer and an accomplished triathlete (qualified for the worlds and 4x nationals). John and his family live in Brookline, MA.

Jonathan DeLong

Through the lenses of biomimicry and biodiversity, Jonathan DeLong is fairly obsessed with intersectionality and the connectedness of all things as a means to break through social and ecological challenges to enhance life on earth. As a co-founder and executive director of Alameda, California’s non-profit The REAP Center for regeneration, education, aquaculture, and permaculture, he primarily supports innovation and community building by integrating art, science, technology, and policy. Beyond the Center’s core climate mission of soil for social change, Jonathan works to further the awareness and growth of democratized climate solutions that are ready for immediate deployment.

Jonathan Foley

Dr. Jonathan Foley is a leading climate scientist, sustainability expert, educator, and public speaker. He is also executive director of Project Drawdown — the world’s leading resource for climate solutions. His work focuses on finding solutions to sustain the climate, ecosystems, and natural resources we all depend on. Foley’s work has led him to become a trusted advisor to governments, foundations, non-profits, and business leaders around the world. He and his colleagues have made contributions to our understanding of climate change, the global food system, and the sustainability of the world’s resources. He has published over 140 scientific articles, including many highly cited works in Nature and Science. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, and is among the top 1 percent most-cited scientists in the world. A noted science communicator, his presentations have been featured at hundreds of venues, including the Aspen Institute, the World Bank, the National Geographic Society, the Chautauqua Institution, the Commonwealth Club, the National Science March, and TED. He has also written many popular pieces in National Geographic, the New York Times, the Guardian, and Scientific American. He has appeared on National Public Radio, the PBS NewsHour, the BBC, CNN, and in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, WIRED, the HBO documentary “Too Hot Not to Handle”, and the film series“Let Science Speak”. Foley has won numerous awards and honors, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, awarded by President Clinton; the J.S. McDonnell Foundation’s 21st Century Science Award; an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship; the Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America; and the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Award. He was also named as the winner of the prestigious Heinz Award for the Environment. Before joining Project Drawdown, Foley led a number of environmental science and sustainability organizations. At the University of Wisconsin, he launched the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) and served as the first Gaylord Nelson Professor of Environmental Studies. He was also the founding director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of Minnesota, where he was the McKnight Presidential Chair of Sustainability. More recently, he served as the Executive Director of the California Academy of Sciences, the greenest science museum on the planet.

Josh Simpson

Josh Simpson is a glass artist whose vibrantly colored vessels and sculpture are often inspired by astrophysical themes. A pioneer of the studio glass movement, Simpson has spent half a century inventing new formulas and making glass objects that combine his fascination with color, form, pattern and complexity, with his interest in the workings of the universe. His iconic Planets evoke imaginary worlds that might exist in distant galaxies, while New Mexico Glass resembles swirling seas or the starry night sky, and Corona Glass evokes deep space phenomena. Simpson’s glass has been displayed in the White House and numerous museums including the permanent collection of the Corning Museum of Glass, Yale University Art Gallery, and Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian.

Juan Enriquez

An active investor in early stage private companies in the life sciences and big data sectors, Juan is one of the world’s leading authorities on the uses and benefits of genomic code. He is the co-author of a recently published book Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation are Shaping Life on Earth (March 2015) which describes a world where humans increasingly shape their environment, themselves, and other species. He is also the author of the global bestseller As The Future Catches You and of The Untied States of America, and co-author of Homo Evolutis. Juan writes, speaks, and teaches about the profound changes that genomics and other life sciences will cause in business, technology, politics, and society. He is one of the top speakers at TED and other venues. He and Bill Gatess were the first outside guest curators for TED. He was the founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project and is on the Genetics Advisory Council for the Harvard Medical School. He has published papers and articles in a variety of forums including The Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Science, Nature, and The New York Times.

Justin Brice

Justin Brice Guariglia (b. 1974) is an American artist and activist whose work poignantly addresses the relationship between humans and the natural world. Brice frequently collaborates with scientists, poets and philosophers to produce work that enables a greater understanding of climate change and the ecological crisis. Notably, this includes a series of missions he’s flown with NASA scientists beginning in 2015 to document Greenland’s rapidly changing ice, images which he used as source material in his work. In his 2019 Earth Day take over of London’s Somerset House courtyard show Reduce Speed Now!, Brice used solar powered highway message boards to platform the voices of indigenous elders, philosophers, poets, writers and activists addressing climate change. WE ARE THE ASTEROID, a collaborative project with the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton, premiered at the Storm King Art Center in 2018, and iterations of the project have been displayed across the United States and abroad. “...the cognitive dissonance on these issues is so great, artists like Justin can provide something to hold onto"" said Beatrice Galilee, Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Solo shows include Somerset House (London); the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach); the Fisher Museum (Los Angeles); the Anchorage Museum; and Lincoln Center. Group shows include the 2019 Venice Biennale (official collateral event); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Storm King Arts Center; Anderson Ranch; and Colby College Museum of Art among others. His 2018 public art project Climate Signals produced by the Climate Museum, in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of NYC, and was seen across all 5 boroughs of New York City. Brice is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Howard Foundation Fellow at Brown University, a New York Foundation for the Arts Finalist, and shortlisted for the COAL Art and Environment Prize (France) awarded to artists working to address ecological issues. He currently holds the title of Senior Fellow and Artist-in-Residence at the climate change think tank Woodwell Climate Research Center (fka Woods Hole Research Center), and is a Distinguished Fellow and Special Envoy to the Ecological Crisis at the Pratt School of Architecture.

Kelsey Wirth

My bio on the MOF website: Kelsey was inspired to start Mothers Out Front after becoming a mother and feeling despair about how climate change will impact her children’s lives. Struck by how few opportunities people had to meaningfully engage in addressing the problem, she set out to change this under the guidance of veteran organizer and social movement scholar Marshall Ganz. Kelsey is co-founder and former president of Align Technology, Inc., maker of Invisalign. She has served on the boards of the Environmental Working Group and Grist Magazine, and currently serves on the board of the Winslow Foundation and Convergent Dental. A native of both Colorado and Washington DC, Kelsey graduated from Harvard College and received her M.B.A. from Stanford University. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Sam Myers, and their two daughters, Sophie and Lucy. Her favorite place to spend time with her family is in the mountains around Crested Butte, CO.

Ken Pucker

Ken is an operator, advisor, investor, and educator with an abiding focus on sustainability and ESG. Ken serves at Berkshire Partners as an Advisory Director, focusing on the consumer and retail sectors and as a founding member of the firm’s Responsible Investment Committee. In addition, Ken serves as a Senior Lecturer at the Tufts Fletcher School. Ken is a published author in periodicals such as the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Institutional Investor and the Harvard Business Review. Ken also is an investor and board member at Rag & Bone and Nexite and serves on the boards of the Commonwealth School, Green City Force, and The High Meadows Institute. Ken spent most of his professional career working at Timberland (formerly NYSE: TBL) serving as COO from 2000 to 2007. After joining the company in 1992, Ken served in multiple roles over a fifteen-year period. During his tenure with the company, Timberland grew by ten fold to over $1.6b in sales. During this period, the company was recognized for nine consecutive years as one of Fortune magazine's 100 Best Companies, as a Forbes magazine's Platinum Investment and as a top ten ethical company according to Business Ethics magazine. Ken received a Master of Science in Business Administration from M.I. T’s Sloan School of management in 1990 and a B.S. from Middlebury College. He lives in Newton with his wife Leslie and their two daughters.

Kent Larson

Kent Larson directs the City Science (formerly Changing Places) group at the MIT Media Lab. His research focuses on developing urban interventions that enable more entrepreneurial, livable, high-performance districts in cities. To that end, his projects include advanced simulation and augmented reality for urban design, transformable micro-housing for millennials, mobility-on-demand systems that create alternatives to private automobiles, and Urban Living Lab deployments in Hamburg, Andorra, Taipei, and Boston. Larson and researchers from his group received the “10-Year Impact Award” from UbiComp 2014. This is a “test of time” award for work that, with the benefit of hindsight, has had the greatest impact over the previous decade. Larson practiced architecture for 15 years in New York City, with design work published in Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, Global Architecture, The New York Times, A+U, and Architectural Digest. The New York Times Review of Books selected his book, Louis I. Kahn: Unbuilt Masterworks (2000) as one of that year’s ten best books in architecture.

Kongjian Yu

A recipient of Doctor of Design at Harvard GSD, Yu is Professor and founding dean of Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape, founder and design principle of Turenscape that practices globally. He is a strong advocate of “ecological security patterns” and “sponge cities” that have been adopted by the Chinese government for the nationwide ecological campaign. His projects have won numerous international design awards including 14 ASLA Excellence and Honor Awards (American Society of Landscape Architects), 5 WAF Best Landscape of the Year Award (World Archi. Festival). He was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He is a recipient of the Doctor Honoris Causa from Sapienza University of Rome and Honorary Doctorate from Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He received the 2020 IFLA Sir Geffrey Jellico Award -- the highest honor given by the International Federation of Landscape Architects, and the 2021 John Cobb Common Good Award

Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos

Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering at the University of Miami with secondary appointments at the School of Architecture and the Department of Ocean Sciences. He is an expert in structural morphology investigating the relationship between a structure’s form, function, material and forces with applications spanning from tensegrity and building systems to marine and coastal structures. He is currently focusing on merging engineering and ecology to develop novel solutions for green/gray infrastructure. He is also the lead engineer behind SEAHIVE™, an efficient and sustainable revetment system. Landolf holds a BS, MS and PhD from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Prior to joining the University of Miami, he was at Princeton University as a member of the Form-Finding Lab. He is a STEAM enthusiast supporting various artistic and educational projects.

Laura Turner Seydel

I inherited my passion for taking care of the planet from my dad, Ted Turner, the original Captain Planet. When my siblings and I were children, my father instilled environmental stewardship into us every chance he got. Today, I work with organizations that address urgent challenges affecting our life support system: our air, water, land, food, biodiversity and climate. As chair of the Captain Planet Foundation, I help guide the organization in empowering and engaging youth to become the next generation of environmental stewards through hands-on experiential learning projects. I also serve on the board of the Children & Nature Network, which has the mission of helping all children to grow up realizing the many benefits that exposure to nature provides. I am co-founder and serve as chair of Mothers and Others for Clean Air, which works to improve air quality for at-risk populations, especially children in the Southeast. I serve on the board of Project Drawdown, which focuses on measuring the top scalable solutions to address global warming. And as a Patron of Nature for the International Union of the Conservation of Nature, I work to address the extinction crisis. With my husband, Rutherford, I co-founded the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, which strives to protect Georgia’s drinking water. Along with that, I serve on the board for the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is a consortium of over 300 local Waterkeeper groups worldwide. To leverage and protect important environmental policies that protect the air, water, land and especially climate, I serve as vice chair of the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund. Additional organizations I work with include the Turner Foundation, United Nations Foundation, Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Turner Endangered Species Fund. I am a member of Atlanta Rotary and serve on the Carter Center Board of Councilors and on the advisory board for the Ray C. Anderson Foundation. I live with my husband, Rutherford, in Atlanta. We have three children and live in the first LEED-certified gold residence in the United States.

Laurel Paula Jackson

Dr. Laurel Paula Jackson is an educational advisor, author and founder. After a career as a concert pianist, Dr. Jackson completed her MSc in International and Comparative education at the University of Oxford, her MPhil at the University of Cambridge, and her Doctoral degree at the university of London. She has spent the past 19 years working with multilateral institutions, NGOs and schools around the world, and founded an Edtech company for children in 2012. She is a mentor to young social entrepreneurs, and an author of picture books. At the moment, Dr. Jackson coaches teachers and advises educational leaders to help them in their capacity to educate and nurture global citizens who are armed with the skills and mindsets that they will need to create sustainable futures for themselves and for the planet.

Leah Penniman

Leah Penniman (li/she/ya/elle) is a Black Kreyol farmer, peyizan, mother, soil nerd, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. She co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2010 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. As Co-ED and Farm Director, Leah is part of a team that facilitates powerful food sovereignty programs - including farmer training for Black & Brown people, a subsidized farm food distribution program for communities living under food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system. Leah has been farming since 1996, holds an MA in Science Education and a BA in Environmental Science and International Development from Clark University, and is a member of clergy in both Vodun and Ifa. Leah trained at Many Hands Organic Farm, Farm School MA, and internationally with farmers in Ghana, Haiti, and Mexico. She also served as a high school biology and environmental science teacher for 17 years. The work of Leah and Soul Fire Farm has been recognized by the Soros Racial Justice Fellowship, Fulbright Program, Pritzker Environmental Genius Award, Grist 50, and James Beard Leadership Award, among others. Her books, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (2018) and Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists (2023) are love songs for the land and her people.

Lejjy Gafour

Lejjy is a self-taught entrepreneur and experienced company operator who made his start creating opportunities at the young age of 14, and he has been working, leading, and building businesses ever since. Lejjy is the former co-founder and CEO of a YCombinator backed biotechnology company, and one of the first operating cellular agriculture companies in Canada. He has over 15 years of experience in both public and private enterprises executing strategy, technology, and product development for everything from financial institutions, manufacturing, public health, to world class universities. He is also a founding member of Cellular Agriculture Canada and currently serves on the board of New Harvest Canada. Lejjy believes that cellular agriculture, and other advanced food technologies, will become a pillar of how we create food over the next decade. He believes food is a fundamental aspect of life, and that we are gazing upon a new horizon of food technologies that will allow us to tackle the systemic problems that we will face as a society.

Lindsey Brannon

Lejjy is a self-taught entrepreneur and experienced company operator who made his start creating opportunities at the young age of 14, and he has been working, leading, and building businesses ever since. Lejjy is the former co-founder and CEO of a YCombinator backed biotechnology company, and one of the first operating cellular agriculture companies in Canada. He has over 15 years of experience in both public and private enterprises executing strategy, technology, and product development for everything from financial institutions, manufacturing, public health, to world class universities. He is also a founding member of Cellular Agriculture Canada and currently serves on the board of New Harvest Canada. Lejjy believes that cellular agriculture, and other advanced food technologies, will become a pillar of how we create food over the next decade. He believes food is a fundamental aspect of life, and that we are gazing upon a new horizon of food technologies that will allow us to tackle the systemic problems that we will face as a society.

Lisa Foster

Lisa D. Foster, Ph. D., ACC is a business coach whose mission is to help managers become better leaders by using emotional intelligence to create the conditions for high performance. In 2005, she founded 1 Bag at a Time, Inc., a first-to-market reusable grocery bag company. A former high-school English teacher, she became a pioneer in the fight against single-use plastic and a top supplier of reusable bags in the US. She sold her business in 2017. As a coach, she shares her expertise in leadership and emotional intelligence with her clients and inspires others to make a difference in their communities and organizations. In addition to coaching, Lisa speaks, leads workshops, and writes about emotional intelligence, leadership, and storytelling.

Luna & Ursus

Intimate and evocative, passionate with a sprinkle of the whimsical Michelle Morton and Joshua Thomas are Luna&Ursus. A creative duo formed in the “end of the road” town of Homer, Alaska, their music honors the beauty in life’s many seasons, and delights in the precious gifts of being human. By blending the stirring sounds of the celtic harp, rhythmic guitar, powerful vocal harmonies, and thoughtful lyricism they set the stage for their listeners to come along on a journey back to the heart. Believing fully in the capacity of music to heal, they bring a uniquely positive and refreshing quality to help soften the lens of the harsh world and that dares you to imagine once again, one that is full of possibilities.

Mathew Barlow

Dr. Mathew Barlow is a Professor of Climate Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research focuses on understanding the causes of extreme weather and climate events and how they will change in a warming world. He has contributed to the international IPCC climate assessment as well as local climate assessments for the greater Boston area.

Matt Houde

Matt Houde is a Cofounder at Quaise Energy and project manager for the $5M grant that Quaise, Inc., received from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) to develop a new drilling technology that could allow the world to access the supercritical geothermal heat that is miles beneath our feet. Existing technologies cannot reach those depths. Matt, who coordinated the writing of the successful ARPA-E grant, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in geological engineering. He went on to earn a master’s degree from Stanford University in civil and environmental engineering. While at Stanford, Matt was an intern for Ormat Technologies, one of the largest geothermal companies in the world. Matt, who lives in Knoxville, TN, is passionate about developing solutions to climate change. To that end, he applauds renewable energy sources like wind and solar. But, “we need a more reliable renewable energy source that uses much less land. Supercritical geothermal fits that spot like a glove."

Maya Dutta

Maya Dutta is an environmental advocate and aspiring ecosystem restorer working to spread understanding on the key role of biodiversity in shaping the climate and the water, carbon, nutrient and energy cycles we rely on. She is passionate about climate change adaptation and mitigation and the ways that community-led ecosystem restoration can fight global climate change while improving the livelihood and equity of human communities. She works on project management, Miyawaki forests, partnerships, research, outreach, and education and advocacy efforts at Biodiversity For a Livable Climate (bio4climate.org). Having grown up in New York City and lived in cities all her life, Maya is interested in creating more natural infrastructure, biodiversity, and access to nature and ecological connection in urban areas.

Megan Pulliam

Megan Pulliam is the Chief Development Officer at TerraPraxis, a nonprofit that innovates, designs, and accelerates scalable, equitable solutions for neglected areas of the climate challenge.

Meghan Olson

Meghan leads Business Development for Ecovative’s MycoComposite™ platform, primarily focused on overseeing the Mushroom® Packaging custom design process, onboarding new customers, and supporting Ecovative's growing network of MycoComposite™ licensees. Meghan has a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a dual B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Design, Innovation & Society from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has been a fan of the company for over a decade since first learning about Ecovative's founders and their story from her late mentor and early Ecovative champion, Burt Swersey. Meghan brings business development experience from local technology company, Vital Vio. She began her career in a fluid system design role at GE Power directly following her M.S. focused on additive manufacturing of composites. Meghan has a deep passion for applying her energy to opportunities that make an impact and loves working with small and agile teams.

Melany Kahn

Melany Kahn is a second-generation forager who learned from her parents, the late abstract painter, Emily Mason and the late landscape painter, Wolf Kahn. For the last 20 years she volunteered to teach children how to forage for wild mushrooms. She attended Wesleyan University, and holds an MSW from Boston College, and an MFA in Film from The Tisch School where she met her illustration collaborator, Ellen Korbonski. Melany has taught film production and documentary at NYU, and was a longtime family mediator. She and her husband live in New Hampshire and Vermont with their children, 3 cats and 17 chickens, and co-own The Porch Cafe in Brattleboro. You can find her foraging at every opportunity. "Mason Goes Mushrooming" is her first book.

Michael Rawlins

Dr. Michael Rawlins is an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and associate director of the Climate System Research Center. Dr. Rawlins earned a Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire in Earth and Environmental Sciences in 2006. His research investigates climate variability and change with a focus on Arctic hydrology and biogeochemical cycling. In this work he and his team advance understanding of physical processes influencing terrestrial water and carbon cycles and the ways in which warming, permafrost thaw, and hydrological cycle intensification are impacting life across the northern high latitudes. Dr. Rawlins has been the principle investigator on projects totaling over $2.1M in research grants from federal agencies including the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Energy. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in leading journals and co-authored book chapters in Arctic Land Cover and Land Use Change in a Changing Climate (2011) and Arctic Hydrology, Permafrost and Ecosystems (2021). He often serves on science teams tasked to produce comprehensive reports for ongoing and future research activities. The science teams included the organizing team for Synthesis Studies of the Pan-Arctic/Earth System; the Science Definition Team which produced the implementation plan for NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE); and the scoping study team for NASA’s Arctic-COLORS (Arctic-COastal Land Ocean inteRactions) project. In his service capacity at UMass Amherst, Dr. Rawlins provides weather and climate data to the public and news organizations, and is frequently interviewed by local and regional television, radio, and print media. This service outreach centers on weather anomalies and climate change across Massachusetts and the Northeast U.S.

Mindy Lubber

Mindy Lubber is the CEO and President of the sustainability nonprofit organization Ceres. She has been at the helm since 2003, and under her leadership, the organization and its powerful networks have grown significantly in size and influence. As a well-known global thought leader, Mindy has inspired coalitions of institutional investors, corporate boards, C-suite executives and capital market leaders to factor sustainability risks and opportunities into decision-making. She regularly speaks to high-level world and national political leaders on clean energy and water policies, and has helped to change the political conversation around tackling climate change to one focused on jobs and the economy. She has received numerous awards for her leadership. In 2020, Lubber received the 'Champions of the Earth' award - the highest environmental honor from the United Nations. In the same year, Lubber made Barron’s Magazine’s inaugural list of the 100 most influential women in U.S. finance and was again a member of the list in 2021. Prior to Ceres, Mindy served as a Regional Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under former President Bill Clinton. She also founded Green Century Capital Management and served as the director of the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (MASSPIRG).

Molly Brown

Molly is a visual artist, map-maker and geographer. She discovered geography at Middlebury College and went on to receive a Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She received a Watson Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to explore the value of map-making for communities and individuals. Molly has worked in environmental and art education for organizations, universities and schools across the country. Her current projects involve map-making with children, conveying climate change through landscape painting, and custom maps for place-based organizations.

Molly Burhans

Molly Burhans is an award-winning Catholic environmentalist, cartographer, and social entrepreneur. She is the founder of GoodLands, an organization whose mission is to mobilize the Catholic Church to use its land holdings for environmental and humanitarian good. Burhans was the chief cartographer for the first unified global map of the Church, which premièred at the Vatican in 2016. She is one of Encyclopedia Britannica's 2022 “20 Under 40,” a winner of the Sierra Club’s EarthCare Award, a U.N. Young Champion of the Earth, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and an Ashoka Fellow.

Neil Hunt

18 years Former Chief Product Officer Netflix; Chief Product Vibrant Planet

Neri Karra Sillaman

" Dr. Neri Karra Sillaman is a fashion business consultant, entrepreneur, and author. As a Professor of Practice in Strategy and an Entrepreneurship Expert at the University of Oxford, she consults for both emerging and established fashion and luxury/lifestyle brands. She has guest lectured for companies including Apple and Credit Suisse, as well as for prominent institutions such as the London School of Economics, the Royal College of Art, Imperial College London, and was appointed as an Adjunct Professor at the New York University (NYU). She has been quoted for her opinion on the industry in the Financial Times, Newsweek, the Business of Fashion, and WWD. A fashion entrepreneur herself, Dr. Sillaman is also the founder of a global multimillion-dollar luxury leather goods brand, which manufactures products for leading Italian luxury labels. She holds a Ph.D. in Management Science from the University of Cambridge and her award-winning book is Fashion Entrepreneurship: The Creation of the Global Fashion Business (Routledge, 2021). "

Nikolas Soren Goodich

Nikolas Soren Goodich has exhibited his paintings across the country since 1990 and in Europe since 2015. After studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 80s and late 90s, he received his BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts in 2019. He is currently represented by Coagula Curatorial Gallery in Los Angeles and Chiefs and Spirits Gallery in The Hague, Netherlands. At 53 years of age, he is a late bloomer having suffered for over a decade from a substance abuse problem which resulted in homelessness, during which time he was literally sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles. In his recovery he returned to university and finished the degree he had started in 1987. Clean and sober for over eight years, he is now making the visionary and ambitious one-of-a-kind luminous layered plexiglass and glass art he has dreamed of for decades. His emerging luminous public art practice has gained the collaboration, support, and mentorship of top professionals in the public art space, including internationally renowned glass art pioneer Narcissus Quagliata, Jan Peters, director of Glasmalerei Peters Studios in Paderborn, Germany, Petra and Michael Mayer of Mayer of Munich, David Judson of Judson Glass in Pasadena, CA, Jeff Grantz, owner of DCL-Boston, a premier architectural public art fabrication company, Shelly Willis of Shelly Willis Consulting, and Sally Krauss of CODAworx.

Nora LaTorre

Nora LaTorre is CEO of award-winning EatReal.org which is a systems transformation nonprofit. It’s solving the root cause of the interconnected climate crisis and human health crisis with a scalable solution. Eat Real expands access hundreds of millions healthier and greener meals each year so every child can flourish. Eat Real asks, “What if schools became the largest buyers of regenerative real food agriculture in the nation?” ... then makes tectonic cultural shifts happen through community-driven change, awareness building and policy + advocacy efforts. A believer in #bettertogether, she’s a Board Member for OneGreenThing.org and a California Department of Food and Agriculture Advisor. She’s part of XPRIZE, The Aspen Institute Socrates Scholars and Chief as well as a leader on numerous national public health coalitions. Nora built her career sparking the conscious consumer movement: working with and advising nonprofits, startups and Fortune 500 companies on triple bottom line and consumer activation. She works to inspire results and collaboration. She invests in future-changing ideas, rising stars and movement building. Nora is motivated by her two toddlers and her love of the mountains.

Pablos Holman

Pablos is like a benevolent supervillain, creating new munitions for the arsenal that humans can use to fight a war against dystopia. Coming out of secret labs full of mad scientists building rockets and lasers and nuclear reactors – Pablos is taking on the problems that keep humans from thriving.

Patrick Dykstra

Patrick Dykstra is the co-star of the semi-biographical feature film ‘Patrick and the Whale’ which chronicle’s Patrick’s decade long connection with a family of sperm whales. The film won the Audience Choice Award at the Innsbruck Film Festival, Newport Beach Film Festival, Graz Film Festival and was nominated for both a Panda award (Wildscreen) and Jackson Wild Media Award as well as the Golden Eye award (Zurich Film Festival). Patrick also hosted and filmed the series Chasing Ocean Giants (Discovery Channel) that has aired in over 150 countries. The eight-part series follows Patrick’s journey across the globe to assist some of the world’s leading scientists in discovering mysteries of the ocean. During the production the team filmed numerous world-firsts and provided a valuable platform for the scientists with whom they worked. Patrick won a BAFTA for his cinematography work on the BBC’s Blue Planet 2 and has since filmed nature programs for Netflix, National Geographic, AppleTV+, Discovery, BBC and others. Prior to his work in natural history, Patrick spent eight years as a corporate lawyer working at one of the world’s most prestigious international law firms representing some of the world’s largest companies and was based in New York, Los Angeles and Dubai before leaving the corporate life behind to pursue his passions. Since leaving the corporate world Patrick has visited 102 countries and has filmed in some of the harshest environments including Yemen’s tribal areas, diving under Antarctic ice and at the top of Congo’s erupting volcanos. He is a certified rebreather scuba diver, wingsuit skydiver, hang-glider and para-glider pilot and is passionate about wildlife conservation. When not on the road Patrick is at home in Bristol, UK

Paul Shapiro

Paul Shapiro is the CEO of The Better Meat Co., the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, a TEDx speaker, and the host of the Business for Good Podcast.

Perry Raso

Perry started digging littlenecks in Point Judith Pond when he was 12 years old. He grew up harvesting shellfish, eel trapping, bull-raking clams, and scuba diving for steamers, as well as working on draggers and lobster boats out of Pt Judith, RI. Before he opened Matunuck Oyster Bar, he was an oyster farmer. Graduating from URI with a bachelors and master’s degree, Raso studied aquaculture and fisheries technology. In 2002 he founded Matunuck Oyster Farm, a wading depth shellfish farm, on Potter Pond in East Matunuck (South Kingstown), RI. He bought a waterfront clam shack in 2009 on the pond where his oyster farm exists to provide a place for work boats to access the farm, and a place to sell fresh oysters from the farm. In 2009 he opened the restaurant and in 2011 he started growing organic vegetables to provide guests with fresh local produce. Most recently he started a shellfish hatchery across the street from the restaurant. He has been doing educational oyster farm tours since 2002 and has traveled to several developing countries to consult on various aquaculture operations. Education and giving back has always been at the core of the business.

Peter de Menocal

Peter B. de Menocal is the eleventh president and director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. A marine geologist and paleoclimatologist, de Menocal’s research uses deep-sea ocean sediments as archives of how and why Earth’s ocean and climate have changed in the past in order to predict how they may change in the future. Prior to assuming leadership of WHOI, de Menocal was the Thomas Alva Edison/Con Edison Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He served as Columbia’s Dean of Science for the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and founded Columbia’s Center for Climate & Life, a climate solutions research accelerator. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, AGU Emiliani lecturer, a Columbia Lenfest Distinguished Faculty award, and a Distinguished Brooksian award. He earned a doctorate in geology from Columbia University and a master’s degree in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from St. Lawrence University. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Peter de Menocal i

Peter B. de Menocal is the eleventh president and director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. A marine geologist and paleoclimatologist, de Menocal’s research uses deep-sea ocean sediments as archives of how and why Earth’s ocean and climate have changed in the past in order to predict how they may change in the future. Prior to assuming leadership of WHOI, de Menocal was the Thomas Alva Edison/Con Edison Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He served as Columbia’s Dean of Science for the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and founded Columbia’s Center for Climate & Life, a climate solutions research accelerator. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, AGU Emiliani lecturer, a Columbia Lenfest Distinguished Faculty award, and a Distinguished Brooksian award. He earned a doctorate in geology from Columbia University and a master’s degree in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from St. Lawrence University.

Peter Minor

Peter Minor, PhD, is the Director of Science & Innovation at Carbon180, a new breed of climate NGO bringing together the people, resources and vision to realize a carbon-removing world. Peter’s knowledge of the latest science and connections to the innovation ecosystem helps the team craft policy recommendations that catalyze the carbon removal industry, including a letter to the Sec. of Energy with recommendations for the proposed Direct Air Capture Hubs to impact early stage innovation, cosigned by 8 of the industry’s top startups. Previously, he built the CITRIS Foundry, a deeptech startup accelerator associated with UC Berkeley, and Blue Bear Ventures, a venture fund for frontier innovation. He is a staunch believer that technology can help solve humanity’s greatest challenges.

Pulkit Agrawal

Dr. Pulkit Agrawal is Steven and Renee Finn Chair Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and co-founded SafelyYou Inc. His research interests span robotics, deep learning, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. Pulkit completed his bachelor's from IIT Kanpur and was awarded the Directors Gold Medal. His work received the Best Paper Award at Conference on Robot Learning 2021 and Best Student Paper Award at Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning 2011. He is a recipient of Sony Faculty Research Award, Salesforce Research Award, Amazon Research Award, Signatures Fellow Award, Fulbright Science and Technology Award, Goldman Sachs Global Leadership Award, etc. His work has appeared multiple times in MIT Tech Review, Quanta, New Scientist, NYPost, etc.

R. John Hansman

R. John Hansman is the T. Wilson Professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics at MIT, where he is the Director of the MIT International Center for Air Transportation. He conducts research in advanced technologies for operational aerospace and transportation. Dr. Hansman holds 7 patents and has authored over 400 technical publications. He has over 6500 hours of pilot in-command time in airplanes, helicopters and sailplanes including meteorological, production and engineering flight test experience. Professor Hansman chairs the US Federal Aviation Administration Research Engineering & Development Advisory Committee (REDAC). He is co-director of the national Center of Excellence in Aviation Sustainability Center (ASCENT). He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), is a Fellow of the AIAA and has received numerous awards including the AIAA Dryden Lectureship in Aeronautics Research, the FAA Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award, the ATCA Kriske Air Traffic Award, a Laurel from Aviation Week & Space Technology, and the FAA Excellence in Aviation Award.

Rafael Ferrari

I am a physical oceanographer interested in the circulation of the ocean, its interaction with the atmosphere and climate. I use a combination of observations, theory and numerical models to investigate all oceanic motions from scales of centimeters to thousands of kilometers. I got interested in oceanography while a physics major at the University of Torino in Italy. I so much enjoyed applying physics principles to explain the world around us that I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in physical oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (La Jolla, CA). After a short postdoc at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, MA), I arrived at MIT (Cambridge, MA) in 2002. Here I have fun investigating the physics of the ocean, atmosphere and climate with the exceptional students and postdocs that come to MIT. It is very rewarding to apply physics principles to understand one of the defining scientific questions of our time: the inner workings of Earth’s climate. I am a faculty of the MIT Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science Department, Director of the MIT Program of Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate, and a member of the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Physical Oceanography and the MIT Climate Modeling Initiative.

Ramin Hasani

Ramin Hasani is a Principal AI and Machine Learning Scientist at the Vanguard Group and a Research Affiliate at CSAIL MIT. Ramin’s research focuses on robust deep learning and decision-making in complex dynamical systems. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Associate at CSAIL MIT, leading research on modeling intelligence and sequential decision-making, with Prof. Daniela Rus. He received his Ph.D. degree with distinction in Computer Science at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria (May 2020). His Ph.D. dissertation and continued research on Liquid Neural Networks got recognized internationally with numerous nominations and awards such as TÜV Austria Dissertation Award nomination in 2020, and HPC Innovation Excellence Award in 2022. He has also been a frequent TEDx Speaker.

Ranjana Bhandari

Ranjana Bhandari is the founder and Executive Director of grassroots environmental advocacy group Liveable Arlington, which began to organize against fracking in Arlington, Texas, in 2015. The group is known for leading strategic winning campaigns to stop drilling expansion in very difficult terrain. Ranjana is the 2017 recipient of the Community Sentinel Award from FracTracker Alliance and Americans Against Fracking. In 2018, she won the Special Service Award from the Texas Chapter of the Sierra Club and is a 2020Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project. Ranjana has a Master’s degree in Economics from Brown University.

Rebecca Herst

Rebecca Herst (she/her) is the Director of the Sustainable Solutions Lab (SSL) at UMass Boston, a research institute focused on climate justice. A leader in the climate adaptation field, Rebecca is working to ensure that anti-racist health promoting policies are central to climate resilience efforts. Under her leadership, SSL has developed a reputation as a respected source of expertise on both climate and social equity and for fostering relationships across fields in order to catalyze change. Her background as a community organizer informs her work as she brings faculty, adaptation professionals, and local leaders together. Previously, Rebecca worked on climate resilience at Boston Harbor Now, Harvard University’s Office for Sustainability, and the Urban Land Institute. Her work has been covered in a wide variety of national and international news outlets including the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and the BBC. She has co-authored op-eds in the Boston Globe and shares her expertise at events locally. She has an MBA from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Carleton College. In 2020, Rebecca was the recipient of the prestigious Roy J. Zuckerberg Endowed Leadership Award. Once every four years, this University of Massachusetts System-wide prize is awarded to a staff member or coach who leads “by serving, by giving, and by pointing the way.”

Robert Ajemian

Robert Ajemian graduated with a degree in physics from Harvard, before enrolling at Boston University’s Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, where he graduated with a PhD specializing in neural networks and computational models for motor control. Currently, he is a research scientist at MIT in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research where he investigates questions in theoretical neuroscience with a focus on neural network models of motor control and memory. His work has been published in scientific journals such as Neuron, Nature, and the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences, and his research – particularly with regard to theories of associative memory and mnemonics – have been reported on by news organizations such as CNN, WBUR, Der Spiegel, and the Boston Globe.

Russ Wilcox

Russ received his bachelor’s degree in physics with honors from Boston University and was a prestigious Rackham Merit Research Fellow at the University of Michigan prior to entering his Data Science career. Russ began his data science career in 2007 working with the United States Geological survey and has since served as a global leading data science consultant, federal expert witness, and guest lecturer at the University of California Los Angeles and Northeastern University. As an accomplished expert in the field of NLP, he spearheaded global initiative for the implementation of semantic search algorithms across the US and Europe’s largest grocery retailers. Russ believes that Data Science should be democratized across all businesses and founded Quantum Analytica to drive this vision forward.

Ryan Killackey

A Chicago native and graduate of The University of Montana, Killackey started his career as a wildlife biologist on various research projects studying frogs in freshwater lakes, tracking and live trapping wolverines, and as a wilderness ranger at a bear observatory in Alaska. But his passion was with amphibians and reptiles. After several years of research and exploration in the US, his passions lead him to the Ecuadorian Amazon and his transition to photography and film began in 2005. He has since worked on several projects for National Geographic, PBS Nature, Giant Screen Films (3D/IMAX), Yale E360 and many others. His work has taken him for over 50 countries across 6 continents. Yasuni Man, Killackey’s first feature documentary earned him 23 award nominations with 15 award wins on the festival circuit, and earned a worldwide distribution deal with Journeyman Pictures. The film also yielded 6 scientific publications from the research conducted in the film, where he and his team discovered 3 species new to science. Currently, Killackey resides in Brooklyn and works as a camera operator for ABC News at their Times Square Studio. He is also working on several projects including a horror film, a historical fiction television series, as well as his next feature documentary, A Light in the Darkness.

Sachem HawkStorm

Sachem Robert Hawk Storm Yawanawa-Bergin is the chief of the Schaghticoke First Nations whose mission is to preserve, promote and enrich the Schaghticoke peoples’ heritage; provide a safe learning environment for Schaghticoke descendants in their search for direction; and whenever possible, support those seeking harmony and a greater understanding of our collective responsibility as human beings. The word “Schaghticoke” means “the Mingling of Waters,” and signifies the merging of what remained of the Algonquin Nations in the Eastern Woodlands in 1676. Sachem Hawk Storm is a direct descendant of the great Pequot Chief Sassucus and Wampanach Schaghticoke Chief Gideon Mawehu and a hereditary leader of one the three remaining tribes of the Schaghticoke Nation. His life’s journey has been one of reclamation, re-indigenization, and reconnection to the land. Since 2012, Sachem Hawk Storm has actively advocated for the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and is the Schaghticoke’s main representative at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Under Sachem Hawk Storm's leadership, Schaghticoke First Nations has created a 501c3 and has reacquired land in the Schaghticoke ancestral territory to establish a Conservation and Cultural Center that will also promote decolonization and ago-forestry. Under the leadership of Sachem Hawk Storm, Schaghticoke First Nations works in close partnership with local indigenous communities throughout the northeastern U.S., as well as with other Indigenous Peoples from around the world.

Shari Liu

Shari Liu studies how our minds and brains reason about the physical and social world, using the tools of developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. She obtained her PhD from Harvard University in 2020, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. She is the recipient of the Goethals Teaching Prize (2019) from Harvard University, and the Glushko Dissertation Prize (2021) from the Cognitive Science Society. Starting in July 2023, she will launch her own lab at Johns Hopkins University.

Shelly Zhang

Shelly earned her PhD at California Institute of Technology in 2016. She founded the green tech startup Molten Materials in 2019. Shelly’s vision is to create a clean and sustainable world for future generations. She believes that through technological innovation, it is achievable to solve the toughest environmental problems the world faces.

Shivam Kajale

Shivam is a PhD candidate and a research assistant at the MIT Media Labs. His research focuses on realizing the goal of highly energy-efficient “beyond CMOS” devices, based on magnetics, spintronics and magnetoelectrics. Data centers across the world are consuming electricity at par with the electricity consumption of entire countries, like South Africa and the United Kingdom. The projected growth of energy consumption in computational hardware over the next few decades has serious global implications. Realizing this urgency, Shivam and his group of researchers are trying to build “beyond CMOS” devices, to replace the billions of silicon-based transistors in our computers with brain-inspired, atomically thin magnetic devices, which are projected to enable thousands of times more energy efficient computation for the sustainable growth of the IT infrastructure. Shivam is an electrical engineer by training, with a B.Tech and M.Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He uses techniques from applied physics, material science and nanotechnology for building scalable and energy-efficient devices for an environmentally sustainable AI ecosystem growth.

Sora Kim

I explore how animals and plants respond to environmental change. My projects often bridge modern and ancient ecosystems since the past can be the key to understanding the future. I am also interested in broadening participation in science. To date, our academic system promotes certain groups to succeed in science but our climate crisis requires innovative, interdisciplinary, and diverse scientists. I was born and raised in the south at a time when there were only boxes for white, black, and "other." While I felt this sense of "other" early in my academic career, I now realize this is where the good stuff is. Science is novel and innovative so it requires reaching out, beyond the comfort zones of tradition.

Soumya Sudhakar

Soumya Sudhakar SM ’20 is a PhD student in aeronautics and astronautics. Her work is focused on the co-design of new algorithms and integrated circuits for autonomous low-energy robotics that could have novel applications in aerospace and consumer electronics. Her contributions bring together the emerging robotics industry, integrated circuits industry, aerospace industry, and consumer electronics industry. Sudhakar earned her BSE in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University and her MS in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT.

Stephen Wilkes

Since opening his studio in New York City, in 1983, photographer Stephen Wilkes has built an unprecedented body of work and a reputation as one of America’s most iconic photographers, widely recognized for his fine art, editorial, and commercial work. In 1998, a one-day assignment to the south side of Ellis Island led to a 5-year photographic study of the island’s long abandoned medical wards where immigrants were detained before they could enter America. Through his photographs and video, Wilkes helped secure $6 million toward the restoration of the south side of the island. In 2000, Epson America commissioned Wilkes to create a millennial portrait of the United States, “America In Detail,” a 52-day odyssey that was exhibited in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Wilkes began his most defining project, Day to Night, in 2009. To create these epic cityscapes and landscapes, Wilkes mounts a camera at a fixed angle for up to 30 hours, capturing fleeting moments of humanity over the course of a full day. Back in his studio, over the course of several months, he blends these images into a single photograph. The resulting images showcase a world the naked eye could never see, revealing deeper truths about places, people, and animals. Day to Night has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning as well as dozens of other prominent media outlets and with a grant from the National Geographic Society, was extended to include America’s National Parks, then to cover Canadian Iconic Species and Habitats at Risk, in collaboration with The Royal Canadian Geographic Society. Day to Night was published by TASCHEN as a monograph in 2019. In 2021 Wilkes, a National Geographic Explorer was commissioned by National Geographic to create a Day to Night image of the Biden Harris Presidential Inauguration. The photograph was featured in National Geographic and exhibited at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in NYC. In September 2022, National Geographic published Wilkes’ “America the Beautiful” as a cover story, featuring his photograph of Bears Ears National Monument as the cover image. Wilkes’ work documenting the ravages of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy has brought heightened awareness to the realities of global climate change. He was commissioned by the Annenberg Space for Photography to revisit New Orleans in 2013 after documenting Hurricane Katrina for the World Monuments Fund. His photographs of Hurricane Sandy were exhibited in the 2014 Sink or Swim, Designing for a Sea of Change exhibition at the Annenberg Center for Photography, in Los Angeles. Wilkes' directorial debut, the documentary film, Jay Myself, world premiered at DOCNYC in November 2018. The film is an in-depth look into the world of photographer Jay Maisel and his move out of his 35,000 sq. foot building at 190 Bowery. Wilkes traveled to Antarctica in 2021 to direct a short film on the capture of the Total Solar Eclipse as an immersive experience for MSG Sphere, in Las Vegas. Despite his intense dedication to personal projects, Wilkes continues to shoot advertising campaigns for the world’s leading agencies and corporations, including Netflix, The New Yorker, Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Nike, Sony, Rolex, and others. Wilkes’ extensive awards and honors include the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography, Photographer of the Year from Adweek Magazine, Fine Art Photographer of the Year 2004 Lucie Award, TIME Magazine Top 10 Photographs of 2012, Sony World Photography Professional Award 2012, Adobe Breakthrough Photography Award 2012 and Prix Pictet, Consumption 2014. Wilkes was born in 1957, he received his BS in photography from Syracuse University S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a minor in business management from the Whitman School of Management in 1980. Wilkes, who lives and maintains his studio in Westport, CT, is represented for his photography by Bryce Wolkowitz, New York; Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe, Holden Luntz Gallery, Palm Beach and Jackson Fine Arts, Atlanta. He is represented for speaking engagements by Changemaker Talent. More: www.stephenwilkes.com IG: @stephenwilkes FB: @stephenwilkesphotography Twitter: @swilkesphoto Links to related talks: https://youtu.be/afev0ZjAhUA https://youtu.be/0ITuQcoLXeE

Steven Donziger

Renowned human rights lawyer, writer, front-line defender, and activist Steven Donziger has been internationally heralded for his focus on addressing human rights abuses and corporate malfeasance. Known for his “Herculean tenacity” (Business Week), Steven is part of the team working with indigenous and farmer communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest, who won a historic $9.5B judgement against Chevron for the environmental cleanup of what experts consider to be one of the worst oil-related catastrophes in the world. Following the stunning victory, he became the main target of a retaliatory campaign by Chevron – the only person ever to be prosecuted by a corporation – and was wrongly imprisoned, receiving support from 68 Nobel Laureates and 120 NGOs working for his release. In a piece for VICE, he reveals the challenges he and other activists have had to overcome for trying to hold a corporation accountable. More on the ongoing story and latest updates can be found at FreeDonziger.com. Steven is sought after for events with groups like Tomorrowland Music Festival, NYU Law, Stockholm+50 Climate Conference, the Hay Festival, the World Rainforest Day Summit, and more. Steven is the Founder of Project Due Process, a legal advocacy group for Cuban detainees who arrived in the United States in the Mariel boat lift. He previously served as the Director for the non-partisan National Criminal Justice Commission that produced the landmark study, The Real War on Crime. Steven’s analysis and commentary on human rights, environmental, and criminal justice matters has been featured in numerous legal publications, academic journals, and news outlets. In 1991, Steven led a mission to Iraq of lawyers, public health specialists, and military experts to assess the impact on civilians of the bombing during the first Gulf War. The group’s report, which found that an estimated 100K children would die following the end of hostilities due to damage to the Iraqi healthcare infrastructure, was adopted by the United Nations and covered in more than 400 media outlets around the world. He is the former chief correspondent for United Press International in Nicaragua, where he reported for a variety of publications during the U.S.-backed contra war. Steven currently serves on the Board of Advisors to the Fortune Society, the largest self-help organization for ex-offenders in the United States. In impactful events, Steven offers insights from his tremendous career as a litigator and advocate, from his decades of work addressing human rights abuses, to cutting edge issues regarding the climate crisis, and how these global events impact individuals, organizations, and communities today.

Tania Roe

Tania is a wildlife, environmental, and social justice advocate. She emphasizes the interconnections between the climate and biodiversity crises and their solutions. She also highlights how they relate to the exploitation of people, especially underserved communities, and animals. By promoting solutions to today’s ecological and social crises, Tania demonstrates the need to include all voices in environmental-related discourse. Tania plans to stay in the non-profit sector and continue spreading awareness on the above topics through her articles, nature photography, community outreach, and digital campaigns including interviews and speaking engagements.

Tesha McCord Poe

Tesha McCord Poe is a passionate educator and fundraiser who uses her legal and business background to leverage and support the long-term success of nonprofits. She particularly focuses on fundraising and diversity, equity and inclusion. A graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University with a B. A. in economics, Tesha received a JD/MBA from Northwestern University and has worked in several industries including broadcast journalism for NBC News, banking for Merrill Lynch, corporate attorney in Silicon Valley and as a tenure track law teacher at a community college under Martha Kanter, former U.S Undersecretary of Education. Tesha has spent more than a decade working as a senior administrator in Independent Schools in the Bay Area. In this capacity Tesha has partnered with leadership teams to set and implement innovative educational strategies and provide growing revenue streams through admissions and fundraising K-12. She’s also helped raise over $100M, including direct solicitations of 6 and 7 figures. She served as the Chief Development Officer for the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Peninsula and as the Chief Advancement Officer for Castilleja School in Palo Alto, California, where she helped to lead the largest campaign in the school's history. Formerly she served as Associate Head of School for Hillbrook School in Los Gatos California where she later returned to serve as a trustee. Tesha currently serves as a Trustee for Prospect Sierra School in Richmond, EatReal Certified in San Francisco and is the Board Chair for the Mariposa Foundation DR based in the Dominican Republic. Most recently she served as Interim Head of School for Girls' Middle School in Palo Alto. She is author of the upcoming book ""Beyond Widow"".

The Chorallaries Of MIT

We are MIT’s first mixed-voice a cappella group, founded in 1976. We perform in the Boston/Cambridge area, tour the country, and go on retreat in Vermont (when we aren't in the middle of a pandemic that is). We also perform at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA) competition. We focus on sound, musicality and performance, and we have a great time singing together!

Togzhan Kassenova

Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow with the Project on International Security, Commerce, and Economic Statecraft (PISCES) at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, strategic trade controls, sanctions implementation, and financial crime prevention. She currently works on issues related to proliferation financing controls, exploring ways to minimize access of proliferators to the global financial system. Kassenova holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Leeds and is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS). From 2011 to 2015 Kassenova served on the UN secretary general’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. Kassenova is the author of Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2022).

Trent Romer

After two decades of co-owning a custom manufacturing business, Trent Romer joined LongueVue Capital as an operating partner focused on sustainability. Trent’s sustainability journey includes environmental outreach efforts, conferences, hands-on implementation and educational experiences through Harvard University, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Training Corps and Yale University. These collective experiences led Trent to writing his first book called Finding Sustainability released by John Hunt Publishing in June 2021. Trent graduated from Hamilton College with a degree in economics. He went on to study at the University at Albany to get a master’s in education and then a master’s in business administration. He is currently consulting companies to help them start and/or further develop their ESG program. He is writing a second book on sustainability to be published in 2023.

Tu David Phu

Top Chef Alumnus, Tu David Phu, is a Vietnamese-American, SF Chronicle Rising Star Chef, and an Emmy-nominated filmmaker from Oakland who cut his culinary teeth in some of the nation’s top restaurants. He has cooked across various cultures, from the American culinary greats to classical European traditions. But it is what he calls “the memory of taste” that pulled him back to his roots: the practices, ingredients, techniques, and flavors of Vietnamese cuisines, and he is passionate about sharing the riches and lessons of his birthright through food.

Tyler Winkler

Tyler Winkler is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. As a coastal oceanographer, Tyler specializes in reconstructing Late Quaternary environmental change using sedimentological and geochemical proxies to analyze stratigraphic records. His research helps elucidate how Holocene climate variability can modulate extreme storm activity and regional hydroclimate in the North Atlantic Ocean. Currently, Tyler and his colleagues are developing records of coastal flooding and extreme storm activity in Atlantic Canada and The Bahamas. This work ultimately seeks to better understand past, present, and future socio-cultural and environmental impacts of coastal flooding and extreme weather events.

Valerie Shen

Valerie Shen is Partner and Chief Operating Officer at G2 Venture Partners. She oversees all operational aspects of the firm and fund including fundraising / LP relations, recruiting / HR, fund administration, impact reporting, legal, compliance, and marketing. Prior to business school, Valerie was an analyst at Kleiner Perkins’ $1B Green Growth Fund, where she helped the team found G2. Before that Valerie was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, where she worked across four continents, primarily on energy projects. She has also held positions at the U.S. Senate, X (Google’s “moonshot factory”), Goldman Sachs, Jane Street Capital, and The Wilderness Society. Valerie holds a B.A. degree summa cum laude in Environmental Science & Public Policy and Earth & Planetary Sciences from Harvard University. She holds an M.B.A. and M.S. in Environment and Resources from Stanford University, where she was a Siebel Scholar and an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Vikash Mansinghka

Vikash Mansinghka is a Principal Research Scientist at MIT, where he leads the Probabilistic Computing Project, part of MIT's CSAIL, Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, and the Quest for Intelligence. Vikash holds S.B. degrees in Mathematics and in Computer Science from MIT, as well as an M.Eng. in Computer Science and a PhD in Computation. He also held graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. His PhD dissertation on natively probabilistic computation won the MIT George M. Sprowls dissertation award in computer science, and his research on the Picture probabilistic programming language won an award at CVPR. He co-founded three VC-backed startups: Prior Knowledge (acquired by Salesforce in 2012) and Empirical Systems (acquired by Tableau in 2018), and Common Sense Machines (funded in 2020), and advises in companies such as DeepMind, Intel, and Google. He served on DARPA’s Information Science and Technology advisory board from 2010-2012, currently serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Machine Learning Research, and co-founded the International Conference on Probabilistic Programming.

Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist. He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a firm focused on assisting entrepreneurs to build impactful new energy and technology companies. Vinod grew up dreaming of being an entrepreneur, despite being from an Indian army household with no business or technology connections. Since the age of 16, when he first heard about the founding of Intel, he dreamt of starting his own technology company. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, Vinod failed to start a soymilk company to service the many people in India who did not have refrigerators. Instead, he came to the U.S. to further his academic studies and received a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Eventually, his startup dreams led him to Silicon Valley, where he received a master’s degree in business administration from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Upon graduation, Vinod co-founded Daisy Systems, the first significant computer-aided design system for electrical engineers. The company went on to achieve significant revenue, profits and an IPO. Then, driven by the frustration of having to design the computer hardware on which the Daisy software needed to be built, Vinod started the standards-based Sun Microsystems in 1982 to build workstations for software developers. As the founding CEO of Sun, he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. Sun Microsystems was funded by Vinod’s longtime friend and board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB). In 1986, Vinod joined KPCB as a general partner. While there, he played a crucial role in taking on Intel’s monopoly by building and growing semiconductor company, Nexgen, which eventually was acquired by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Nexgen/AMD was the only microprocessor to have significant success against Intel. Thereafter, Vinod helped incubate the idea and business plan for Juniper Networks to take on Cisco System's dominance of the router market. He also was involved in the formulation of the early advertising-based search strategy for Excite. In addition to his many other contributions at KPCB, he helped transform the moribund telecommunications business and its archaic SONET implementations with Cerent Corporation, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1999 for $7.2 billion. In 2004, driven by the need for flexibility to accommodate four teenaged children, the desire to be more experimental and to fund sometimes imprudent "science experiments," Vinod formed Khosla Ventures to focus on both for-profit and social impact investments. His goals remain the same: work and learn from fun and knowledgeable entrepreneurs, build impactful companies by leveraging innovation and spend time with a partnership that makes a difference. Vinod has a passion for nascent technologies that have beneficial effects and economic impact on society. While he only serves on the boards of a few select companies, he works closely with most KV companies as they face transitions or key decisions. Vinod’s greatest passion is being a mentor to entrepreneurs building technology-based businesses. He is driven by the desire to make a positive impact through scaling new energy sources, achieving petroleum independence and promoting a pragmatic approach to the environment. He also is passionate about social entrepreneurship with a special emphasis on microfinance as a poverty alleviation tool. He is a supporter of many microfinance organizations in India and Africa. He also has been experimenting with innovations in education and global housing. Vinod also is a charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a non-profit global network of entrepreneurs and professionals that was founded in 1992 and has more than 40 chapters in nine countries today. He is a founding board member of the Indian School of Business (ISB). Vinod holds a bachelor of technology degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India, a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a master’s degree in business administration from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Yaniv Altshuler

Dr. Yaniv Altshuler is an experienced entrepreneur and an industry-leading expert on Artificial Intelligence and Data Analysis. Yaniv has published over 70 scientific papers and filed 17 patents. His research has been covered by Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Spectrum and others. His book on Security and Privacy in Social Networks was published in 2012, followed by a second book on Swarms and Network Intelligence in 2017, and a third book on Applied Swarm Intelligence, to be published in 2022. After receiving his PhD in Computer Science Dr. Altshuler has worked with MIT Prof. Alex ""Sandy"" Pentland on the development of the new field of Social Physics. Over the past decade Dr. Altshuler used his expertise to advise leading financial institutes and government agencies worldwide. Among his activities, Dr. Altshuler currently serves as the Strategic Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation to the Israeli Defense Force.

Zeyneb Magavi

Zeyneb is Co-Executive Director of HEET, a nonprofit climate solutions incubator. In 2017, Zeyneb proposed a networked geothermal growth model to Massachusetts gas utilities resulting in six funded demonstration projects in MA and many more elsewhere - helping to launch a promising new decarbonization pathway. She has convened and is leading an independent research consortium to study the first gas utility installations of this innovative alternative to gas infrastructure. Zeyneb previously led HEET’s Large Volume Leak Study research, which developed and enacted a method to rapidly cut emissions from leaking gas pipes in half. Before entering the sustainability world, she led the development of multiple technological solutions to challenges in Global Health, including in South Africa, Senegal, Thailand, Brazil, and Botswana. She has been part of launching two start-ups and has worked at BBN Technologies and Harvard University. Zeyneb studied physics at Brown University and global health and sustainability at Harvard University. She is committed to creating and driving forward compassionate, multi-disciplinary and innovative solutions to the urgent challenge of climate change.