Program Hosts
Onstage, TED2011 will be hosted by TED Curator Chris Anderson, TED's Executive Producer of Media, June Cohen, TED's European Director Bruno Giussani, and TED Community Director Tom Rielly. Session 6 will be hosted by Bill Gates, and Session 9 will be hosted by Juan Enriquez.
Chris Anderson, Curator, TED
Chris Anderson is the curator of the TED Conference. His first publishing company, Future Publishing, grew rapidly under the motto "media with passion." Expanding to the United States, he built Imagine Media, publisher of Business 2.0 magazine, and creator of the games website IGN. Thanks to this success, Anderson created the Sapling Foundation, which hoped to find new ways of tackling global issues by leveraging media, technology, entrepreneurship, and ideas. Sapling acquired the TED Conference in 2001, and Anderson left his businesses to focus on TED, developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.
June Cohen, Executive Producer, TED Media
As Executive Producer of TED Media, June Cohen has been responsible for bringing the TED Conference online and helping to grow its audience to more than 150 million viewers worldwide. In 2006, she launched TEDTalks, the online video series of TED Conference talks, followed by TED.com, the TED Open Translation Project and the TED Open TV Project. Cohen also co-produces and co-hosts the TED Conference in California. A journalist by training, she was previously VP of Content at HotWired.com, the pioneering website from Wired magazine. In 1991, she launched the world's first networked multimedia magazine, at Stanford University.
Bruno Giussani, European Director, TED
Bruno is the European director of TED, the curator of the TEDGlobal and TED University programs, and the co-host of TEDGlobal. As a member of TED's senior team he participates in the development and implementation of TED's strategy globally. He's also a member of the boards of Swiss software company Tinext and of the Knight Fellowships at Stanford University. Previously, he has written for a number of publications in Europe and the US including the New York Times, the WSJE and the Swiss newsmagazine L'Hebdo; was in charge of online strategy at the World Economic Forum; and has co-founded three Internet companies.
Tom Rielly, Community Director, TED
Tom Rielly is Community Director at TED Conferences. He created and directs the prestigious international TED Fellows program, which brings outstanding young people from around the world to be part of the TED community. The program will have graduated 240 people after February 2011. Tom Rielly is best known as the founder and former CEO of PlanetOut.com, which joined forces with Gay.com to create the largest gay and lesbian online company with over 5 million monthly customers. Based in San Francisco, the company is now called PlanetOut, Inc.
Bill Gates, Philanthropist
Bill Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Along with co-chair Melinda Gates, he sets the overall direction of the organization. Gates began his major philanthropic efforts in 1994, when he created the William H. Gates Foundation, which focused on global health. Three years later, he and Melinda Gates created the Gates Library Foundation, which worked to bring public access computers with Internet connections to libraries in the US. Its name changed to the Gates Learning Foundation in 1999 to reflect its focus on ensuring that low-income minority students are prepared for college and have the means to attend. In 2000, the two groups merged into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Juan Enriquez, Futurist
A broad thinker who studies the intersection of science, business and society, Juan Enriquez was the founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, and has published widely on topics from the technical (global nucleotide data flow) to the sociological (gene research and national competitiveness), and was a member of Celera Genomics founder Craig Venter's marine-based team to collect genetic data from the world's oceans. He is a Managing Director at Excel Medical Ventures, a life sciences venture capital firm, and the chair and CEO of Biotechonomy, a research and investment firm helping to fund new genomics firms.