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).

Microsoft Nerd Center
One Memorial Drive
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139
United States

Amber Nigam

Amber is the co-founder and CEO of a digital health startup, basys.ai, with more than a decade of experience in healthcare and Artificial Intelligence. He leads sales and fundraising for the startup. His startup, basys, helps payers and care providers reduce costs by designing better workflows. More specifically, basys helps improve prior-auth and utilization management through our proprietary disease-tracking platform. Amber graduated from Harvard University with an MS degree in the Health Data Science program and has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. At Harvard, he was a Cheng's fellow and received the ""Roslyn and Lisle Payne"" scholarship. In his last entrepreneurial stint as co-founder and CTO at kydots.ai, Amber led sales and engineering teams to deliver the SaaS product to enterprise clients in the financial management and human capital domains. The team led by Amber filed two patents and published a research paper for our proprietary platform. Amber believes in the power of community and collective leadership. He relishes his experience mentoring startups at Harvard, MIT, and the wider Boston ecosystem. He previously led joined Harvard Business Club as a Co-Director, where he helped Harvard founders with strategy and fundraising. As someone interested in applied machine learning, Amber has led a few professional and academic initiatives in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. For instance, he has co-instructed the course ""Collaborative Data Science in Medicine - HST.953"" at MIT. Amber has also published in top machine learning conferences like NeurIPS and ACL and top journals like Lancet and Springer.

Ami Bhatt

Ami B. Bhatt, MD, FACC, is the chief innovation officer (CIO) at the ACC and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. Her interest in digital health strategy and the digital transformation of the cardiovascular field stems from the belief that state of the art, personalized care can be delivered to individuals in the community, empowering patients and creating stronger clinician-patient partnerships for sustainable health outcomes. The ACC Innovation Program has a robust platform to transform digital patient care and advance technologies that are reshaping medicine. Dr. Bhatt has 20 years of experience as a clinician, investigator and educator with nearly 10 years of experience in telemedicine and digital health. She founded her first program in cardiovascular virtual care in 2013 and continues to work on creating culturally relevant personalized virtual cardiovascular care delivery models. Her research has centered on identifying and implementing solutions to overcoming access barriers to cardiovascular and telemedicine care. As President of the American Heart Association in Boston, she founded and led “Conversations from the Heart”, an educational series on cardiovascular health in South Asians and in 2023 designed and helped launch the South Asian Heart Health and Nutrition Program at MassGeneral Brigham’s Newton Wellesley Hospital. She is the Chair of the American Heart Association Heart Ball in May 2023 with a focus on highlighting CPR, AED use and South Asian Heart Health. A graduate from Harvard College and the Yale School of Medicine, Bhatt completed her medicine and pediatrics residency at Harvard, her adult cardiology fellowship at Brigham and Women's Hospital and her adult congenital heart disease and pulmonary hypertension fellowship at the Boston Children's Hospital. She was the inaugural Liberthson Endowed Scholar in Adult Congenital Heart Disease (ACHD) at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She most recently served as the director of Outpatient and Telecardiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Bhatt is now co-leading the inaugural year of the MGH Elevate Leadership Program aimed at transforming leaders for tomorrow’s healthcare challenges. As part of MGH Elevate, Dr Bhatt is focused on fostering agility, communication, and creativity to develop the next generation of impactful leaders in medicine.

Ana-Maria Constantin

Ana-Maria Constantin is the CEO and Co-founder of Cascade Health, an intelligent platform for healthcare transparency. With a strong background as a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, she brings extensive expertise in building large-scale cloud systems that leverage machine learning for intelligent, data-driven decision-making, optimizing processes, and driving efficiency. Ana-Maria's passion lies in creating mission-driven technologies that have a profound impact on human lives. She firmly believes in the potential of AI to transform the healthcare industry, optimize healthcare costs, and truly bring transparency to every day healthcare decision making.

Bob Metcalfe

Robert (Bob) Metcalfe is recognized for creating the foundational technology of the Internet which supports more than 5 billion users and enables much of modern life. ACM has named Bob Metcalfe as recipient of the 2022 ACM A.M. Turing Award for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet. Metcalfe is an Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at The University of Texas at Austin and a Research Affiliate in Computational Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” carries a $1 million prize with financial support provided by Google, Inc. The award is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundations of computing.

Dan Elton

Dan Elton has a Ph.D. in physics and is now work in AI for medical imaging.

Deblina Sarkar

Deblina Sarkar is an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and AT&T Career Development Chair Professor at MIT Media Lab. She heads the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek research group and carries out trans-disciplinary research fusing engineering, applied physics, and biology to develop disruptive technologies for nanoelectronic devices and create new paradigms for life-machine symbiosis. Her inventions include, among others, a 6-atom thick channel quantum-mechanical transistor overcoming fundamental power limitations, an ultra-sensitive label-free biosensor, technology for nanoscale deciphering of biological building blocks of brain and ultra-miniaturized antenna that can work wirelessly from inside a living cell. Her PhD dissertation was honored as one of the top 3 dissertations throughout USA and Canada in the field of Mathematics, Physical sciences and all departments of Engineering. She is the recipient of numerous other awards and recognitions, including the Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 from India, NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, the IEEE Early Career Award in Nanotechnology, Innovative Young Engineer Recognition from National Academy of Engineers, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award with the highest and rarely achieved impact score, the MIND Prize and the Science News 10 Scientists to Watch.

Isaac Kohane

Computational Nerd with clinical training. Dr. Kohane is an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, and an Associate in Medicine in the Division of Pediatric Endocrinology at Children's Hospital in Boston. He is also a Research Affiliate at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and a founding member of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute Center for Outcomes and Policy Research. He received a ScB with Honors in Biology at Brown University. He pursued research in knowledge-based systems at the Clinical Decision-Making Group, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, under the auspices of the Boston University MD, PhD program, and he received both degrees. He completed a residency in Pediatrics at Children's Hospital in Boston followed by a fellowship in Pediatric Endocrinology. He became director of the Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP) in 1995. In 1991, Dr. Kohane completed implementation of the Clinician's Workstation (CWS) at Children's Hospital, which has been in operation since then in several specialty clinics. The CWS has been successfully used for several clinical research projects in addition to its primary role as a pediatric record system. Dr. Kohane was chief architect of the World Wide Web Electronic Medical Record System (W3-EMRS), which has been the foundation of several multi-institutional implementations and collaborations. He was instrumental in organizing a collaboration among several Boston teaching hospitals, the Boston EMR Collaborative, which has led to the identification of several significant problems in multi-institutional data sharing as well as the articulation of a model confidentiality policy. Other contributions in medical informatics include research into temporal reasoning and trend detection. Dr. Kohane has chaired the two most recent spring symposia on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine at Stanford University, sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Jennifer Eckhoff

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Surgical Artificial Intelligence & Innovation Laboratory; SAIL, MGH Surgical Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the integration of AI technologies and techniques, such as machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing, into the field of surgery to improve surgical outcomes, enhance surgeon performance, and optimize patient care. By leveraging AI capabilities, surgical processes can be streamlined, intraoperative decision-making can be supported, and the collective knowledge of surgeons worldwide can be harnessed to advance the practice of surgery. However, the application of AI in surgery presents unique challenges due to the complex nature of surgical procedures. Surgical AI requires advanced computer vision techniques to analyze surgical videos, which involve both temporal and spatial components.

Manolis Kellis

Manolis Kellis is a professor of computer science at MIT, a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a principal investigator of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group (compbio.mit.edu). His research includes disease circuitry, genetics, genomics, epigenomics, coding genes, non-coding RNAs, regulatory genomics, and comparative genomics, applied to Alzheimer's Disease, Obesity, Schizophrenia, Cardiac Disorders, Cancer, and Immune Disorders, and multiple other disorders. He has helped lead several large-scale genomics projects, including the Roadmap Epigenomics project, the ENCODE project, the Genotype Tissue-Expression (GTEx) project, and comparative genomics projects in mammals, flies, and yeasts. He received the US Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) by US President Barack Obama, the Mendel Medal for Outstanding Achievements in Science, the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, the Boston Patent Law Association award, the NSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Technology Review TR35 recognition, the AIT Niki Award, and the Sprowls award for the best Ph.D. thesis in computer science at MIT. He has authored over 280 journal publications cited more than 148,000 times. He has obtained more than 20 multi-year grants from the NIH, and his trainees hold faculty positions at Stanford, Harvard, CMU, McGill, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and other top universities. He lived in Greece and France before moving to the US, and he studied and conducted research at MIT, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and the Cold Spring Harbor Lab. For more info, see: compbio.mit.edu

Manolis Kellis

Manolis Kellis is a professor of computer science at MIT, a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a principal investigator of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group (compbio.mit.edu). His research includes disease circuitry, genetics, genomics, epigenomics, coding genes, non-coding RNAs, regulatory genomics, and comparative genomics, applied to Alzheimer's Disease, Obesity, Schizophrenia, Cardiac Disorders, Cancer, and Immune Disorders, and multiple other disorders. He has helped lead several large-scale genomics projects, including the Roadmap Epigenomics project, the ENCODE project, the Genotype Tissue-Expression (GTEx) project, and comparative genomics projects in mammals, flies, and yeasts. He received the US Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) by US President Barack Obama, the Mendel Medal for Outstanding Achievements in Science, the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, the Boston Patent Law Association award, the NSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Technology Review TR35 recognition, the AIT Niki Award, and the Sprowls award for the best Ph.D. thesis in computer science at MIT. He has authored over 280 journal publications cited more than 148,000 times. He has obtained more than 20 multi-year grants from the NIH, and his trainees hold faculty positions at Stanford, Harvard, CMU, McGill, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and other top universities. He lived in Greece and France before moving to the US, and he studied and conducted research at MIT, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and the Cold Spring Harbor Lab. For more info, see: compbio.mit.edu

Mariam Khayretdinova

Mariam Khayretdinova is a co-founder and CEO of Brainify.AI, an AI/ML biomarker platform aimed at developing novel treatments for depression. She holds a Master of Liberal Arts in Psychology from Harvard and combined B.S./M.S. degrees in Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Methods in Economics from Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics, and Informatics. Prior to co-founding Brainify.AI, Khayretdinova held various positions in the tech industry for over a decade, ranging from data analyst to senior business consultant for companies like Coca-Cola, Unlivelier, and EPAM Systems. She also held positions in the medical research field such as Senior Research Assistant at Lisa Maeng Lab Wheaton College and Harvard Medical School and Research Fellow at the Brainclinics Foundation,

Nikhil Bhojwani

Nikhil Bhojwani is a Managing Partner at Recon Strategy, a consulting firm that he co-founded in 2010. Recon’s clients include health systems, provider organizations, payers, life-science firms, digital health firms, and non-profits. While most of these clients are large incumbent players, the firm sets aside 25% of its capacity for early-stage companies, and Nikhil stays close to the startup community as an investor, board member, and/or advisor to several companies. These include CIC-Health, a national leader in COVID testing and vaccinations, which was founded based on a blueprint set out in an HBR article Nikhil co-authored with HSPH professor, Dr. Atul Gawande. Prior to starting Recon, Nikhil spent several years at The Boston Consulting Group, where he worked on strategy, organization, and operational topics for a range of healthcare organizations. Before that he worked in the publishing and media business in India, during which time, he co-authored an award-winning book, wrote a regular column for a leading newspaper, and developed and taught a semester-long course at two business schools. Nikhil recently completed a 4-year stint as a Boston board member at the non-profit TiE, the largest network of entrepreneurs in the world. He is also on the board of Reimagining Migration, a non-profit working to improve the experience of immigrant children in schools and in society. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University and an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, both with honors.

Rich Miner

Rich Miner was a co-founder of Android, Inc., origin of the Android mobile operating system and was an executive on the Android team after its acquisition by Google. Miner also co-founded Wildfire Communications, a voice communications startup that was sold to Orange in April 2000. He has a doctorate in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The Richard A. Miner School of Computer & Information Sciences at UMass Lowell was named after Miner in 2022.

Rickard Brüel-Gabrielsson

MIT researcher specializing in foundation models and generative AI, previously at Stanford. Serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Unbox AI, a leading company innovating in foundation models and generative AI for behavior-driven businesses.

Trishan Panch

Dr Panch is an entrepreneur, physician, executive and keynote speaker. He co-founded Wellframe and co-led the company from inception in 2012 to acquisition by Blackstone/Health Edge in 2021 serving as Chief Medical Officer, Chief Product Officer and Chief Innovation Officer. He is the holder of a full utility patent on the Wellframe technology and is the inaugural recipient of Harvard’s Public Health Innovation Award for his work in Digital Health. He is the President of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health Alumni Association and is responsible for advancing the strategic interests of the school and it's 13,000 alumni. He is also an Instructor at HSPH and founder and director of ""Applied AI for Health Care"" - a certificate program in AI for healthcare executives. He serves on the Innovation Advisory Board of Boston Children's Hospital and is Vice President of the Board of Directors at Healthcare for All - a leading health policy think tank and advocacy organisation. He practiced medicine for 17 years and lead a large risk bearing primary care group in London serving an urban population with high levels of economic deprivation. He is an active angel investor in the Harvard and MIT community and has been nominated to serve as the healthcare expert in residence at Harvard's iLab since 2019. He has delivered multiple keynote presentations for healthcare organizations, management consultancies, life sciences companies and technology companies in the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America.