Program Speakers A-Z

Access to technology is quickly becoming a human right. At the Center for Digital Inclusion, Rodrigo Baggio works to narrow the digital divide.

Laura Boushnak is a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian photographer whose work focuses on women, literacy and education reform in the Arab world.

Boushnak's documentary project I Read I Write explores the barriers women face accessing education and the role of literacy in improving the lives of women in Egypt, Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. For the project, Boushnak encouraged women to write their thoughts on prints of their portraits, engaging them directly in the artistic process. Boushnak’s images have been widely published, and her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. She is a co-founder of Rawiya, a collective that brings together the work and experience of female photographers from the Middle East.

In the tribal region where she was born, Khalida Brohi founded an organization to end honor killings and empower Pakistani women.

Casuarina is one of the most respected modern samba bands of Brazil.

As the duo Circle of Sound, Soumik Datta and Bernhard Schimpelsberger integrate influence and instruments across cultures -- pinned together by Indian rhythm. Call it “Indo-rock opera.”

Soumik Datta is a virtuoso of the 19-stringed sarod, a fretless, lute-like instrument traditional in northern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh that’s notable for its harmonic and drone sounds. Meanwhile, Bernhard Schimpelsberger, from Austria, has developed an idiosyncratic drumming style, playing Indian rhythms on a heavily customized western-style kit.

Each musician has a solo career -- but together, as Circle of Sound, they synthesize rock and electronic music, Western and Indian classical styles, into a rocking, hypnotic mix propelled by Indian rhythms, which Schimpelsberger has called “the most profound rhythmic system in the world.”

Brazilian chef Teresa Corção founded the Maniva Institute to reinvigorate her country's connection with its food heritage—starting with manioc.

Fabien Cousteau spent 31 days underwater to research how climate change and pollution are affecting the oceans.

Catherine Crump is an assistant clinical professor at Berkeley Law School who focuses on the laws around data and surveillance.

Catherine Crump is a civil liberties lawyer whose work focuses on combating government surveillance and protecting the free speech rights of political protesters. She has filed cases challenging the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security. Crump is an assistant professor at Berkeley Law School; previously she was an attorney for ACLU for nine years.

In her writing for the ACLU, Crump warns against the dangers of national mass surveillance technology, which can all too easily end up as tools for local police forces. She writes, "Not only our country as a whole, but also the police, will be better off in the long run if we have an open debate about what today’s technology can do, versus what it should do."

A young classical pianist, Juliana D’Agostini is known for technical virtuosity and a fresh, engaging style.

Sangu Delle is an entrepreneur and clean water activist. A TED Fellow who hails from Ghana, he sees incredible potential in the African economy.

Born in Ghana, Sangu Delle's childhood home was a refuge for victims of torture and violence from neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone. Delle graduated from Harvard College with highest honors in African Studies and Economics. He was awarded the Soros Fellowship and pursued a Juris Doctor of Law and MBA at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, respectively.

At Harvard, enrolling in the Social Engagement Initiative program that bridged the academic study and practical service gap, Delle co-founded cleanacwa (formerly the African Development Initiative) in 2007, which today is currently working to bring clean water and sanitation to over 200,000 people in 160 villages in the Ayensuano, Suhum and Nandom districts in Ghana. Delle is also passionate about mental health and wellness, and was a founding member of Harvard University’s Mental Health Alumni Special Interest Group. 

Delle has previously worked at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Valiant Capital Partners. Convinced that the real needs of communities can best be met through entrepreneurship, in 2008 he founded an investment holding company, Golden Palm Investments(GPI) to fund promising start-ups that can have social impact and generate jobs. GPI has backed technology startups such as Andela, Flutterwave and mPharma.  GPI has also built a portfolio of greenfield companies in healthcare, agriculture and financial services. Delle serves as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GPI.

Delle has received several international accolades including being named a 2016 finalist for “Young CEO of the Year” by the Africa CEO Forum, Africa’s “Young Person of the Year” in 2014 by the Future Africa Awards, selected as a 2014 TEDGlobal Fellow, Forbes’ top 30 most promising entrepreneurs in Africa and Euromoney’s “Africa’s Rising Stars” award. Institut Choiseul and Forbes Afrique named Delle as one of the top “100 Economic Leaders in Africa” in 2015. Mic named Delle as one of 9 entrepreneurs in the millennial generation making a difference. 

Delle is a Trustee of the Peddie School in NJ and serves on the Advisory Board and chairs the Leadership Council of Harvard University’s Center for African Studies. He also serves on the inaugural West Africa Advisory Group of the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University.

Delle loves the outdoors and trekked Mount Everest in 2013 and summited Kilimanjaro during the summer of 2015.

Melissa Fleming sheds light on their devastating plight and remarkable resilience of refugees.

Almost 60 million people in the world today have been forcefully displaced from their home - a level not seen since WWII. As many as four million Syrian refugees have sought refuge in neighboring countries. In Lebanon, half of these refugees are children; only 20 percent are in school.

Melissa Fleming, Head of Communications and Spokesperson for the High Commissioner at UN's High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), calls on all of us to make sure that refugee camps are healing places where people can develop the skills they'll need to rebuild their hometowns. Investing in this, she says, may well be the most effective relief effort there is. This inspires her and the teams at the UNHCR to tell stories of the individuals who are displaced.

Fleming's 2017 book, A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea, was born out of the story of Doaa Al Zamel, told her in TED Talk.

Fleming was named senior advisor and spokesperson for UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, in October 2016.

Wendy Freedman led the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope, a massive earthbound observatory.

Journalist Misha Glenny leaves no stone unturned (and no failed state unexamined) in his excavation of criminal globalization.

In minute detail, Misha Glenny's 2008 book McMafia illuminates the byzantine outlines of global organized crime. Whether it's pot smugglers in British Columbia, oil/weapons/people traffickers in Eastern Europe, Japanese yakuza or Nigerian scammers, to research this magisterial work Glenny penetrated the convoluted, globalized and franchised modern underworld -- often at considerable personal risk.

The book that resulted is an exhaustive look at an unseen industry that Glenny believes may account for 15% of the world's GDP.

Legal society ignores this world at its peril, but Glenny suggests that conventional law enforcement might not be able to combat a problem whose roots lie in global instability.

While covering the Central Europe beat for the Guardian and the BBC, Glenny wrote several acclaimed books on the fall of Yugoslavia and the rise of the Balkan nations. He's researching a new book on cybercrime, of which he says: "The key to cybercrime is what we call social engineering. Or to use the technical term for it, there's one born every minute."

Watch TED's exclusive video Q&A with Glenny: "Behind the Scenes of McMafia" >>

Charmian Gooch is the 2014 TED Prize winner. At Global Witness, she exposes how a global architecture of corruption is woven into the extraction and exploitation of natural resources.

Charmian Gooch co-founded the watchdog NGO Global Witness with colleagues Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley, in response to growing concerns over covert warfare funded by illicit trade in 1993. Since then, Global Witness has captured headlines for their exposé of "blood diamonds" in Uganda, of mineral exploitation in the Congo, of illegal timber trade between Cambodia and Thailand, and more. With unique expertise on the shadowy threads connecting corrupt businesses and governments, Global Witness continues its quest to uncover and root out the sources of exploitation.

In 2014, Gooch and Global Witness were awarded the $1 million TED Prize, along with the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, for their campaign to end anonymous companies. Gooch's TED Prize wish: for us to know who ultimately owns and controls companies and launch a new era of openness in business. Global Witness highlighted the importance of this issue in an investigation, aired on 60 Minutes, where they sent an undercover investigator into 13 New York law firms. The investigator posed as an adviser to a government minister in Africa and asked for thoughts on how to move money into the United States for a plane, a yacht and a brownstone. All but one firm offered advice. 

The Panama Papers, released in April of 2016, further demonstrate the need for transparency. The papers paint a picture of how the rich and powerful around the world use offshore accounts and anonymous companies to move money. "This secretive world is being opened up to global public scrutiny," said Gooch, on the day the papers were released.

Jon Gosier is a serial tech entrepreneur and early-stage startup investor. In 2015, Time magazine listed him as one of the "12 New Faces of Black Leadership."

Jon Gosier is an investor and data scientist. He's a partner at Third Cohort Capital, an early-stage tech startup investment fund. Prior to joining Third Cohort, he was the founder of Appfrica, which invests in Africa’s technology economy, D8A Group, a company that makes data science solutions, and Market Atlas, which is like the Bloomberg terminal for emerging market countries. In 2015, Gosier was listed by TIME Magazine as one of “12 New Faces of Black Leadership”, as well as “Most Influential Blacks in Technology” by Business Insider in 2013 and 2014 and among the "20 Angels Worth Knowing" by Black Enterprise Magazine.

Gosier is a Fellow and Senior Fellow at TED from 2009 to 2012 and  a first-year participant at THNK, the Amsterdam School for Creative Leadership in the Netherlands. He's won the Knight News Challenge twice, once in 2011 for work in analysis at Ushahidi and again in 2012 for work creating ways of moving data between mobile phones without a central mobile network.

Michael Green is part of the team that has created the Social Progress Index, a standard to rank societies based on how they meet the needs of citizens.

In his book Philanthrocapitalism (co-authored with Economist business editor Matthew Bishop), Michael Green defined a new model for social change built on partnerships between wealthy businesses, governments and community organizations. Shortly thereafter, Bishop floated the idea of a "Social Competiveness Index," the idea that one day countries would compete with one another to be the most socially advanced, in the same way as they now compete to be economic top dog. Green loved it and decided to turn it into reality.

Teaming up with Avina's president Brizio Biondi-Morra, Sally Osberg of the Skoll Foundation and many other thought leaders from businesses and foundations, he began work on what would become the Social Progress Imperative, of which he's now CEO. Later they were joined by Harvard management guru Michael E. Porter, who became chairman of the SPI's advisory board. The first Social Progress Index was published in 2014.

Glenn Greenwald is the journalist who has done the most to expose and explain the Edward Snowden files.

As one of the first journalists privy to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s archives, Glenn Greenwald has a unique window into the inner workings of the NSA and Britain's GCHQ. A vocal advocate for civil liberties in the face of growing post-9/11 authoritarianism, Greenwald was a natural outlet for Snowden, who’d admired his combative writing style in Salon and elsewhere.

Since his original Guardian exposés of Snowden’s revelations, Pulitzer winner Greenwald continues to stoke public debate on surveillance and privacy both in the media, on The Intercept, and with his new book No Place to Hide -- and suggests that the there are more shocking revelations to come.

Ever wondered what a TED Talk would sound like set to music? Grupo TEDx has the answer.

Ameenah Gurib-Fakim is the president of the Republic of Mauritius. She has been a university professor and entrepreneur before her election as the first female Head of State of Mauritius.

In June 2015, Ameenah Gurib-Fakim became the first female president of Mauritius. She's been honored as one of Foreign Policy's 2015 Global Thinkers and is moving to create opportunity and growth for her island home. Gurib-Fakim has been, prior to joining the State House, the Managing Director of the Centre International de Développement Pharmaceutique (CIDP) Research and Innovation as well as professor of organic chemistry with an endowed chair at the University of Mauritius.

Gurib-Fakim has long been a leading biodiversity scientist studying and validating the flora of Mauritius, one of the world's key biodiversity hotspots. As an entrepreneur at CIDP R & I and professor of organic chemistry, she analyzed the plants from the region for their health, nutritional and cosmetic applications.

Working as Haas&Hahn, artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn splash color onto urban walls -- and train young painters in the process.

Meklit Hadero is an Ethiopian-American singer-songwriter living the cultural in-between, both in her own luminous compositions and as a co-founder of the Nile Project.

Meklit Hadero's music is imbued with poetry and multiplicity, from hybridized sounds of Tizita (haunting and nostalgic music) drawing from her Ethiopian heritage, to the annals of jazz, folk songs and rock & roll. Hadero describes her music as emanating from “in-between spaces,” and the result is a smoky, evocative world peopled by strong bass, world instruments and her soothing voice.

In the Nile Project, founded along with Egyptian ethnomusicologist Mina Girgis, Hadero set out to explore the music of the Nile basin, pulling influences from countries along the river, from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, and finally to Egypt. The project brings together hip-hop, traditional and contemporary music, with instruments and traditions old and new. As she says, "My work on a lot of levels is about multiplicity." Their new record is Aswan. 

About her own music, here's what people say:

“Soulful, tremulous and strangely cinematic, Meklit’s voice will implant scenes in your mind — a softly lit supperclub, a Brooklyn stoop, a sun-baked road. Close your eyes, listen and dream." -- Seattle Times

"Meklit… combines N.Y. jazz with West Coast folk and African flourishes, all bound together by her beguiling voice, which is part sunshine and part cloudy day.” -- Filter Magazine

Meklit Hadero is an Ethiopian-American singer-songwriter living the cultural in-between, both in her own luminous compositions and as a co-founder of the Nile Project.

Meklit Hadero's music is imbued with poetry and multiplicity, from hybridized sounds of Tizita (haunting and nostalgic music) drawing from her Ethiopian heritage, to the annals of jazz, folk songs and rock & roll. Hadero describes her music as emanating from “in-between spaces,” and the result is a smoky, evocative world peopled by strong bass, world instruments and her soothing voice.

In the Nile Project, founded along with Egyptian ethnomusicologist Mina Girgis, Hadero set out to explore the music of the Nile basin, pulling influences from countries along the river, from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, and finally to Egypt. The project brings together hip-hop, traditional and contemporary music, with instruments and traditions old and new. As she says, "My work on a lot of levels is about multiplicity." Their new record is Aswan. 

About her own music, here's what people say:

“Soulful, tremulous and strangely cinematic, Meklit’s voice will implant scenes in your mind — a softly lit supperclub, a Brooklyn stoop, a sun-baked road. Close your eyes, listen and dream." -- Seattle Times

"Meklit… combines N.Y. jazz with West Coast folk and African flourishes, all bound together by her beguiling voice, which is part sunshine and part cloudy day.” -- Filter Magazine

In creating large-scale, community-driven projects that float, artist Constance Hockaday comments on the use of public space, the phenomenon of gentrification, and the importance of universal access to waterways.

Artist Constance Hockaday grew up on the US-Mexico border, the daughter of a Chilean librarian mother and an American marine biologist father. “This has left me rich with skills for navigating cultural complexity … and the ocean,” she says. For nearly 15 years, Hockaday has immersed herself in outsider maritime projects. Through large-scale, community-driven art projects staged on the water, she couples her explorations of urban waterfronts with interrogations of queerness and belonging.

Hockaday's work has included helping to build a 50-foot catamaran with the nomadic collective Floating Neutrinos and a boat hotel on an abandoned marina in New York City. Most recently, she created a floating peep show in San Francisco that imagines the reopening of some of the city’s now shuttered iconic queer businesses. Her work comments on the use of public space, the phenomenon of gentrification, and the importance of universal access to public waterways.

Next up for Hockaday, the project Always Get on the Boat, to celebrate and mourn the San Francisco artist community of the Fifth Street Marina, which is being threatened by development along the Oakland waterfront.

After learning her daughter’s mysterious and debilitating illness was related to food allergies, Isabel Hoffmann started developing technology that reveals exactly what’s in our food.

Chikwe Ihekweazu is an epidemiologist and public health expert who works on response to disease outbreaks.

Chikwe Ihekweazu is the Managing Partner of EpiAfric, a health consultancy firm that enables access to expertise in public health research. He is a medical epidemiologist and consultant in public health medicine; until recently he co-led the Centre for Tuberculosis at the South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases, Johannesburg, South Africa. Prior to this, he was a Consultant Regional Epidemiologist, working for the UK's Health Protection Agency, covering the South East region of England.

Dr. Ihekweazu has undertaken several short term consultancies for the World Health Organisation (WHO), mainly in response to major outbreaks and the design of surveillance systems, taking him to Geneva, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, Turkey and Nigeria. He is on the board of the Public Health Foundation of Nigeria, Society for Family Health, and Education as a Vaccine and coordinates the Nigerian Public Health Network.

He blogs at Nigeria Health Watch. He is a TEDGlobal Fellow.

Social entrepreneur Syed Karim plans to make universal Internet access a reality through small satellites.

A Middle East Liaison Officer for Hivos, an international development organization, Doreen Khoury engages with populations struggling to survive war and the disappearance of state structure.

An architect and urban designer, Alison Killing uses journalism, filmmaking and exhibitions to help people better understand the built environment.

Alison Killing is an architect and urban designer working to engage people with their built environment, via design of buildings and urban strategies, film making, exhibitions and events. She explores the relationship between death and modern architecture, looking at how cities are rebuilt after disaster.

Recent projects include Death in the City (and its first iteration, Death in Venice, which was shown as an independent event during the opening week of the Venice Architecture Biennale), a touring exhibition about death and modern architecture; work with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on better rebuilding after disaster and how to integrate relevant urban design tools into humanitarian response; and a study of financial models for arts and community projects temporarily using vacant buildings to help these projects become self-sustaining.

Joe Landolina is a TED Fellow and the inventor of VETI-GEL.

Joe Madiath brings Indian villagers together around water and sanitation projects.

When he was 12, Joe Madiath unionized young workers to fight for better work conditions. They were employed by... his own father. He was therefore sent away to a boarding school. After his studies, travels across India, and participating in relief work afer a devastating cyclone, in 1979 he founded Gram Vikas. The name translates to "village development" in both Hindi and Oriya, the language of the state of Orissa, where the organization is primarily active.

The bulk of Gram Vikas' efforts are on water and sanitation. The organization's approach is based on partnership with villagers and gender equity. In order to benefit from Gram Vikas' support to install water and sanitation systems, the entire village community needs to commit to participate in the planning, construction and maintenance, and all villagers, regardless of social, economic or caste status, will have access to the same facilities. This requirement of 100 percent participation is difficult, Madiath acknowledges, but it leads to socially equitable and long-term solutions. Gram Vikas has already reached over 1,200 communities and over 400,000 people.

Using software to inspire public debate and enable voter engagement, Pia Mancini hopes to upgrade modern democracy in Argentina and beyond.

Patrícia Medici leads the longest running conservation project to protect the threatened lowland tapir.

Patrícia Medici is a Brazilian conservation biologist whose main professional interests are tapir conservation, tropical forest conservation, metapopulation management, landscape ecology and community-based conservation.

For the past 20 years, Patrícia has been working for a Brazilian non-governmental organization called IPÊ, Instituto de Pesquisas Ecológicas (Institute for Ecological Research), of which she was one of the founding members together with Cláudio and Suzana Padua. Since 1996, Patrícia has coordinated the Lowland Tapir Conservation Initiative in Brazil. Since 2000, Patrícia has been the Chairperson of the IUCN/SSC Tapir Specialist Group (TSG), a network of over 120 tapir conservationists from 27 different countries worldwide.

Patrícia has a Bachelor’s Degree in Forestry Sciences from the São Paulo University (USP – Universidade de São Paulo), a Masters Degree in Wildlife Ecology, Conservation and Management from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG – Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), Brazil, and a Ph.D. Degree in Biodiversity Management from the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), University of Kent, United Kingdom. 

Patrícia has been honored with three very prestigious conservation awards: Harry Messel Conservation Leadership Award from the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2004, Golden Ark Award from the Golden Ark Foundation in the Netherlands in 2008, and Whitley Award from the Whitley Fund for Nature in the United Kingdom also in 2008. Patrícia received the 2011 Research Prize from the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) of the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.

Singer and songwriter Juana Molina dreams up whispery, layered pop songs full of loops and swirls and unanswered questions.

Global wanderer Vincent Moon explores and documents vanishing traditions with his evocative ethnomusical films.

American lawyer Kimberley Motley is the only Western litigator in Afghanistan's courts; as her practice expands to other countries, she thinks deeply about how to build the capacity of rule of law globally.

Kimberley Motley possesses a rare kind of grit—the kind necessary to hang a shingle in Kabul, represent the under-represented, weather a kaleidoscope of threats, and win the respect of the Afghan legal establishment (and of tribal leaders). At present she practices in the U.S., Afghanistan, Dubai, and the International Criminal Courts; as her practice expands to other countries, she thinks deeply about how to engage the legal community to build the capacity of rule of law globally.

After spending five years as a public defender in her native Milwaukee, Motley headed to Afghanistan to join a legal education program run by the U.S. State Department. She noticed Westerners stranded in Afghan prisons without representation, and started defending them. Today, she’s the only Western litigator in Kabul, and one of the most effective defense attorneys in Afghanistan. Her practice, which reports a 90 percent success rate, often represents non-Afghan defendants as well as pro-bono human rights cases.

Sipho Moyo aims to catalyze agricultural growth in Africa by calling on governments to create better policies and asking investors to fund better infrastructure.

Robert Muggah creates tools to understand cycles of violence in urban environments and opens dialogues on ways to confront them globally.

Robert Muggah drills down through shadowy data on arms trafficking, urban violence and resilience in search of answers for a rapidly urbanizing society’s most troubling questions: Why are cities so violent, and increasingly fragile? Why are conflicts within nations replacing conflicts between them? And what strategies can we implement to reduce violence?

Muggah's high-tech toolkit includes new ways for citizens to collect, collate and understand data, such as the mapping arms data (MAD) tool. As the research director of the Igarapé Institute and the SecDev Foundation, he developed the tool in collaboration with the Peace Research Institute Oslo and with Google Ideas, winning accolades for the transparency it brings to the debate.

Mundano's bold, colorful street art isn't just eye candy. His projects call attention to social, environmental and political issues, while raising chuckles from passersby.

Mundano is a Brazilian street artist and activist whose work makes people stop and think about the issues swirling around them everyday. In 2007, he began using his graffiti skills to paint "carroças," the wooden and metal carts used by the trash collectors throughout Brazil who haul off junk and recyclables. He painted 200 carroças and in the process made these invisible superheroes visible—not only in the streets, but also in the media. The effort led to "Pimp My Carroça," which made this initiative do-it-yourself, crowdfunded and global. It has brought in 170 trash collectors in cities around the world, teaming them up with 200 street artists and 800 volunteers. It is quickly becoming a movement.

At home in Brazil, Mundano works on other projects too. Since 2008, he has used the posters and banners that plaster Brazilian cities during elections to create thought-provoking art. For the election in 2014, he turned these enormous plastic banners into a giant voting booth filled with waste in a square in Rio de Janeiro. "I use these ads to get people to reflect on the corrupted political system. On all the false promises, and all the awful waste," he explains.

Vik Muniz delights in subverting a viewer's expectations. He uses unexpected materials to create portraits, landscapes and still lifes, which he then photographs.

Slf-effacing, frankly open and thought-provoking, all at the same time, Vik Muniz explores the power of representation. He's known for his masterful use of unexpected materials such as chocolate syrup, toy soldiers and paper confetti, but his resulting images transcend mere gimmickry. Most recently, he's been working with a team at MIT to inscribe a castle on a grain of sand ... 

Muniz is often hailed as a master illusionist, but he says he's not interested in fooling people. Rather, he wants his images to show people a measure of their own belief. Muniz has exhibited his playfully provocative work in galleries all over the world and was featured in the documentary Waste Land, which follows Muniz around the largest garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro, as he photographs the collectors of recycled materials in which he finds inspiration and beauty. Describing the history of photography as "the history of blindness," his images simply but powerfully remind a viewer of what it means to see, and how our preconceptions can color every experience.

The dance “O passinho do menor da favela” is a style of choreography that emerged from popular funk balls in Rio.

Ethan Nadelmann has ushered the once-marginal issue of drug legalization onto the center stage of US political debate.

Jimmy Nelson’s photographs of vanishing tribes illuminate the indigenous cultures of our shared world.

Miguel Nicolelis explores the limits of the brain-machine interface.

At the Nicolelis Laboratory at Duke University, Miguel Nicolelis is best known for pioneering studies in neuronal population coding, Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) and neuroprosthetics in human patients and non-human primates.His lab's work was seen, famously though a bit too briefly, when a brain-controlled exoskeleton from his lab helped Juliano Pinto, a paraplegic man, kick the first ball at the 2014 World Cup.

But his lab is thinking even bigger. They've developed an integrative approach to studying neurological disorders, including Parkinsons disease and epilepsy. The approach, they hope, will allow the integration of molecular, cellular, systems and behavioral data in the same animal, producing a more complete understanding of the nature of the neurophysiological alterations associated with these disorders. He's the author of the books Beyond Boundaries and The Relativistic Brain.

Miguel was honored as one of Foreign Policy's 2015 Global Thinkers.

Aakash Odedra sets raw ancient dance forms from India within the modern global context.

A young circus performer and juggler, Gustavo Ollitta manipulates the buugeng (an S-shaped staff) to create a surreal, ethereal performance.

Alessandra Orofino founded Meu Rio, Rio de Janeiro’s largest mobilization network.

After working as a field researcher in Brazil and India, interviewing young girls who had been victims of domestic violence, Alessandra Orofino founded Meu Rio in 2011. The organization has fueled bottom-up local politics using a combination of on-the-ground actions and custom-designed online and mobile platforms and apps.

Orofino, who's 25 years old with a degree in economics and human rights from Columbia, is a believer in participatory politics and in cities as the ideal locus for reinventing representative democracy, and with her team she has designed Meu Rio as a catalyst for youth activism. Among its 140,000 members are tens of thousands of millennials, identifying common issues, pooling ideas for solutions, and pressuring decision-makers to adopt new policies and practices.

José Padilha delves into interlocking layers of street crime and institutional power with his unflinching action and documentary films.

Bel Pesce left Brazil to study at MIT. But after a successful stint in Silicon Valley, she returned to inspire others with great ideas in her country to make them a reality.

Bel Pesce has worked at big technology companies — in at internship at Microsoft, she led the team for Microsoft Touchless and, as an intern at Google, she worked to improve the Google Translate system. She has also worked in finance, at Deutsche Bank, and helped launch several startups — most notably, the video platform Ooyala and Lemon Wallet, an app that replicates the contents of your wallet on your phone.  But for her latest venture, Pesce is looking to inspire. She has opened a school, FazINOVA, which is dedicated to helping students — both in live courses in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and online — persevere toward their dreams. The school has grown tremendously since its establishment in 2013.

Pesce, a TED Fellow, is also the author of three books: The Brazilian Girl from Silicon Valley, Superheroes: WANTED and The Girl from Silicon Valley 2. She has been named one of the "100 most influential people of Brazil" by Época Magazine.

In Elizabeth Pisani's latest book, she explores the "improbable nation" of Indonesia.

Pisani spent two years travelling 23,000 kilometers by boat, bus and motorbike through Indonesia, a place that has fascinated and maddened her since she first lived there over two decades ago. Her portrait of the country, the recent Indonesia Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation, reveals the archipelago's complexity and contradictions, a fascinating diversity that "is not just geographic and cultural: different groups are essentially living at different points in human history, all at the same time."

An alumna of various government health agencies, Pisani became an assumption-busting independent researcher and analyst, polling transgendered sex workers, drug addicts and others to illuminate the surprising (and often ignored) demographics that belie traditional studies.

Pisani is fearlessly outspoken on the global failure to understand and manage the realities of AIDS, decrying the tangled roles that money, votes, and media play in the public health landscape. She shows how politics and "morality" have hogtied funding, and advocates for putting dollars where they can actually make a difference. As the Globe and Mail wrote: “Pisani is lucid, colourful, insightful and impatient.”

As fast as the rainforest is disappearing -- the people of the rainforest are disappearing even faster. Mark Plotkin works to preserve generations of knowledge.

Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist, studying the traditional uses for plants in Central and South America forests. He works closely with shamans, community leaders who practice traditional healing techniques using plants and animals, learned over uncounted generations. But when forests are disrupted (by illegal logging, for instance), that knowledge risks being lost. Plotkin's work helps to collect and share shamanic learning, with a twofold goal: to preserve the rainforest by showing its value as a source of yet-to-be-discovered pharmaceuticals.
 
Plotkin pioneered his research working with the Trio Indians of southern Suriname, and has also worked with elder shamans from Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. He's the author of the best-selling book Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice. With his wife, Liliana Madrigal, he co-founded the Amazon Conservation Team, a group that helps indigenous people purchase and protect their sacred sites.

Drawing inspiration from frugal innovators in emerging markets, Navi Radjou helps businesses with limited resources discover unexpected ways to succeed.

Economist Dilip Ratha was the first to analyze the global significance of remittances -- money sent from foreign workers to their families back home.

At over US$400 billion per year, and growing, remittances -- money sent home by migrants -- are three times bigger than the total of international aid budgets, and represent some of the largest financial inflows to poor countries. Economist Dilip Ratha was the first to point out the global and national significance of remittances and their social and economic impact.

He is the manager of the Migration and Remittances team at the World Bank and the head of the Global knowledge partnership on migration and development (KNOMAD). He also co-coordinates the G8/G20 Global Remittances Working Group, and is involved in a number of other organizations focusing on remittances. Besides migration, he has done pioneering work on innovative financing including diaspora bonds and South-South foreign direct investment.

TED Senior Fellow Usman Riaz is an artist and composer.

Usman Riaz is the founder of Mano Animation Studios -- Pakistans first hand-drawn animation studio. Their first project, The Glassworker (شیشہ گر), was created by a team of creatives from Pakistan, Malaysia, Canada, South Africa, the US and the UK. 

TED Senior Fellow Usman Riaz is an artist and composer.

Usman Riaz is the founder of Mano Animation Studios -- Pakistans first hand-drawn animation studio. Their first project, The Glassworker (شیشہ گر), was created by a team of creatives from Pakistan, Malaysia, Canada, South Africa, the US and the UK. 

TED Senior Fellow Usman Riaz is an artist and composer.

Usman Riaz is the founder of Mano Animation Studios -- Pakistans first hand-drawn animation studio. Their first project, The Glassworker (شیشہ گر), was created by a team of creatives from Pakistan, Malaysia, Canada, South Africa, the US and the UK. 

Sometimes called the "happiest man in the world," Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, author and photographer.

After training in biochemistry at the Institute Pasteur, Matthieu Ricard left science behind to move to the Himalayas and become a Buddhist monk -- and to pursue happiness, both at a basic human level and as a subject of inquiry. Achieving happiness, he has come to believe, requires the same kind of effort and mind training that any other serious pursuit involves.

His deep and scientifically tinged reflections on happiness and Buddhism have turned into several books, including The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet. At the same time, he also makes sensitive and jaw-droppingly gorgeous photographs of his beloved Tibet and the spiritual hermitage where he lives and works on humanitarian projects.

His latest book on happiness is Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill; his latest book of photographs is Tibet: An Inner Journey.

Andrés Ruzo investigates the Earth's heat and the mystery of a boiling river in the Peruvian rainforest.

Andrés Ruzo is a tri-citizen who grew up among Nicaragua, Peru and Texas -- which helped him see that most of the world's problems are not confined by geographic or cultural borders. While trying to imagine solutions, he realized the way we produce and use energy lies at the root of many of our biggest issues. Combined with his memories of summers on his family's farm on Nicaragua's Casita volcano, playing in the fumarole fields, this prompted him to pursue a PhD in geophysics at SMU, focusing on geothermal studies. He is also a National Geographic Young Explorer.

Investigating a childhood legend led him to the Shanay-timpishka, the "Boiling River" of the Amazon, and a sacred site to the indigenous tribes, where the water can reach over 95 °C (203 °F). The greatest mystery of this place: How can a "boiling river" exist 700 km (435 miles) from the nearest volcanic center?

Ruzo is the author of the TED Book, The Boiling River: Adventure and Discovery in the Amazon.

In her writings, Taiye Selasi explores our relationship to our multiple identities.

A writer and photographer of Nigerian and Ghanaian descent, born in London and raised in Boston, now living in Rome and Berlin, who has studied Latin and music, Taiye Selasi is herself a study in the modern meaning of identity. In 2005 she published the much-discussed (and controversial) essay "Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What Is an Afropolitan?)," offering an alternative vision of African identity for a transnational generation. Prompted by writer Toni Morrison, the following year she published the short story "The Sex Lives of African Girls" in the literary magazine Granta.

Her first novel Ghana Must Go, published in 2013, is a tale of family drama and reconciliation, following six characters and spanning generations, continents, genders and classes.

Kenyan musician, producer and DJ Blinky Bill Sellanga makes experimental, genre-bending music for popular radio while addressing political themes and giving voice to Kenyan youth.

Producer, DJ and musician, Bill Sellanga (also known as "Blinky Bill") makes experimental, genre-bending music for popular radio. He is also the frontman of popular musical collective Just A Band, whose most recent album, Sorry for the Delay, was released in 2012. Sellanga released a solo EP, We Cut Keys While You Wait, earlier this year, and he is currently working on his first full length solo album, Everyone's Just Winging It and Other Fly Tales. 

Two decades after transforming a struggling equipment supplier into a radically democratic and resilient (and successful) company, Ricardo Semler wants organizations to become wise.

After assuming control of Semler & Company (Semco) from his father in 1980, Brazil's Ricardo Semler began a decades-long quest to create an organization that could function without him, by studying and then implementing what could best be called "corporate democracy", allowing employees to design their own jobs, select their supervisors, and define pay levels. He has then applied the same principles to education, banking and hospitality. All with very good results.

He's now promoting the idea of designing organizations -- companies, schools, NGOs -- for wisdom. With a question as a starting point: If we were to start from scratch, would we design organization X the way we have done it?

Global development expert Alanna Shaikh takes on the toughest of health issues—from the ones affecting the globe at large to the ones hurting her own family.

TED Fellow Alanna Shaikh is a global health and development specilist with a vendetta against jargon. On her blog, Blood and Milk, she aims to make global development issues both accessible and understandable. In her TED Book, What's Killing Us, she explains the biggest challenges in global wellness -- from HIV/AIDS to the diminishing effectiveness of antibiotics -- in a way that anyone can understand. Earlier this year, she co-founded AidSource, a social network for aid workers. She is also the co-founder of the group SMART Aid, which educates donors and start-up projects about international aid. 

Alanna Shaikh is especially interested in Alzheimer's, as she has watched her father deteriorate from the disease over the past 12 years. But she says the experience has not sent her into denial—she plans to be prepared for the genetically transmitted disease, should it ever arrive. 

Ad exec Jose Miguel Sokoloff has led a multi-year marketing campaign that's helped Colombian guerrillas realize that they are wanted back home.

Steve Song founded Village Telco to develop a network infrastructure that can bring affordable voice and internet service to communities throughout Africa and around the world.

Jorge Soto is helping develop a simple, noninvasive test that identifies cancer.

Omoyele Sowore runs Sahara Reporters, a grass-roots Nigerian news organization at the frontlines of the citizen journalist movement.

As a student struggling against the Nigerian military junta of the ’80s and ’90s, Omoyele Sowore marvelled at the power of the journalists who spoke out against corruption -- only to become frustrated as the mainstream Nigerian media succumbed to intimidation.

After surviving abduction and torture and moving to the US, Sowore realized that Nigeria’s emerging online culture opened the door for web journalism in Africa. As a partner in Elendu Reports, Sowore began exposing the financial abuses of corrupt politicians. In 2006, he founded Sahara Reporters, a popular online news platform with a reputation for scathing and accurate reporting.

With roots in the Havana underground music scene, Danay Suárez’s soulful, lyrical hip-hop style is a powerful addition to Cuban and world music culture.

Danay Suárez's music has hit big worldwide since London producer Gilles Peterson featured her on his first Havana Cultura compilation of artists from Cuba. But her soul -- and her smooth hip-hop lyrics -- reflect the complex beauty of Havana.

This came to the fore after Jay-Z and Beyoncé spent their fifth anniversary in Havana in 2013; some US fans got upset about that, so Jay-Z wrote the scathing track “Open Letter,” picking apart Cuban-American relations. And who was the first Cuban artist to respond? It was Suárez -- who looked past the immediate fracas to tell the story of the Cuban people through her eyes. As Afropop.org translates her lyrics: “We are the polemical species on the planet / We are victims of an incomplete freedom.”

Robert Swan has explored both poles, and wants to make sure that Antarctica, the world's last great wilderness, is never exploited.

When Robert Swan, OBE, set foot on the North Pole in 1989, he entered the history books as the first person to walk to both poles. But the South Pole, which he had reached in 1984, inspired his life's work -- to preserve Antarctica in the face of climate change.

Swan's organization 2041 (named for the date when the world’s moratoriums on mining and drilling in Antarctica will expire) leads expeditions of the world's most influential people to the continent in hopes that it will ignite their passion for preservation. The hope: to affect real and lasting environmental policy changes.

Ghanaian Fred Swaniker founded a school and a leadership network to educate and support the next generation of Africa’s leaders.

Ilona Szabó de Carvalho designs solutions for some of the world's biggest challenges -- from reducing violence and reforming drug laws to renewing democracy and fighting polarization.

Ilona Szabó de Carvalho is the cofounder and executive director of the Igarapé Institute, a "think-and-do" tank based in Brazil. She also cofounded Agora, a political movement of young leaders advancing innovative, evidence-based public policy. In her work, she tackles issues like responsible firearms regulation, criminal justice and progressive drug policy. She coordinated the Global Commission on Drug Policy from 2011-2016, reaching out to presidents, business leaders and civic groups to rethink the war on drugs. 
  
In addition to her column with Folha de Sao Paulo, Szabó de Carvalho is the author of Drugs: The Untold Stories and Public Security to Change the Game. She gave her first TED Talk in 2014, and in 2015 she was nominated to be a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum.

Bassam Tariq delights in making eclectic career choices. A blogger, a filmmaker, and a butcher's shop owner, the common theme linking everything together is his boundless celebration of humanity.

"Our purpose is simple: we are here to change the world’s relationship to their food." TED Fellow Bassam Tariq does not have small dreams; every project he undertakes is a big plan to make real change. Hence the butcher's shop he helped to open in Manhattan's East Village is organic, halal, and specifically designed to encourage healthier eating habits and happier families.

In 2011, Bassam and his friend Aman Ali resolved to spend each night of Ramadan in a different mosque in 30 states around the United States -- and write about the experience. The result, 30 Mosques in 30 States, was a celebration of the stunning diversity of the Muslim experience in America, and a celebration of individual stories worth telling. Similarly, his documentary, These Birds Walk, is a portrayal of real life for street kids in Karachi, Pakistan.

Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a documentary photographer who works around the world on issues relating to women, birth rights, depopulation and post-conflict regions.

Ana Tijoux mixes a whirlwind of influence from her Chilean heritage as well as traditional Latin beats and hip-hop.

When Ana Tijoux takes the stage to perform her political, personal and intricate tracks, she brings with her a raft of global influence -- but it comes out as completely new. She first gained attention as a hip-hop MC with Makiza, a late-’90s Chilean band influenced by the conscious, positive rap style of De La Soul. With her 2006 hit “Eres par mi,” a duet with Mexican singer Julieta Venegas, she topped the pop charts in Latin America. And then her song “1977” appeared on the TV hit Breaking Bad ...
 
Her latest record is Vengo, released in March 2014, which MTV called “some of the most dazzling hip-hop this year.” She spills her powerful lyrics -- about nature, and about the nature of power -- over original instrumental tracks that feature South American instruments (and no samples). As she writes: “Vengo, en busca de respuestas con el manojo lleno y las venas abiertas/ Vengo, como un libro abierto, ansiosa de aprender la historia no contada de nuestros ancestros.” (“I come for answers, with a bundle of full and open veins/ I come as an open book eager to learn the untold story of our ancestors.”)

Journalist and photographer Bruno Torturra is the face of Media Ninja, a Brazilian digital collective making headlines for its ability to cover big news as it happens.

The co-host of TEDxMidAtlantic, Dave Troy is a serial entrepreneur and a data-viz fan.

Dave Troy is a serial entrepreneur and community activist in Baltimore, Maryland. He is CEO and product architect at 410 Labs, maker of the popular e-mail management tool Mailstrom.co. He has been acknowledged by the founding team at Twitter as the first developer to utilize the Twitter API, with his project “Twittervision,” which was featured in the 2008 MoMA exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind.” His crowdsourced project Peoplemaps.org uses social network data to map cities. He is also organizer of TEDxMidAtlantic and is passionate about data, cities, and entrepreneurship.

Read his post, "The Math Behind Peoplemaps."

Techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci asks big questions about our societies and our lives, as both algorithms and digital connectivity spread.

We've entered an era of digital connectivity and machine intelligence. Complex algorithms are increasingly used to make consequential decisions about us. Many of these decisions are subjective and have no right answer: who should be hired, fired or promoted; what news should be shown to whom; which of your friends do you see updates from; which convict should be paroled. With increasing use of machine learning in these systems, we often don't even understand how exactly they are making these decisions. Zeynep Tufekci studies what this historic transition means for culture, markets, politics and personal life.

Tufekci is a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Her book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, was published in 2017 by Yale University Press. Her next book, from Penguin Random House, will be about algorithms that watch, judge and nudge us.

A jazz icon since the late 1960s, Naná Vasconcelos contributed Latin percussion to some of the world’s most cerebral, soulful music.

Angelo Vermeulen wears many hats, including one as a crew commander for NASA, another as an artist and community organizer.

If you're looking for someone who embodies "multidisciplinary," look no further than TED Senior Fellow Angelo Vermeulen, a space systems researcher, biologist, artist and community organizer. The one common thread in all his work: the desire to understand the relationship between nature and technology, to learn from what's happened in the past in order to build a promising future for us all. 

Having received his PhD in Biology from the University of Leuven in Belgium, Angelo nonetheless eschewed a life in the lab to apply a creative lens to everything he does. To date, that includes working on independent projects around the world, including Biomodd, a worldwide series of interactive art installations in which technology and nature coexist. Throughout 2011, he was a member of the European Space Agency Topical Team Arts & Science (ETTAS), while in 2013 he was crew commander of the NASA-funded HI-SEAS Mars mission simulation in Hawaii. For this project, he and a crew of six astronauts lived for four months in a dome, all in the name of studying the effects of longterm isolation among a small crew.

In 2009 he launched SEAD (Space Ecologies Art and Design), a platform for research on the architectures and ethics of space colonization. In 2014, he launched Seeker, a project calling for the public to co-create starship sculptures that evolve over time; this subject is also the focus of a new PhD at Delft University of Technology, for which he's developing "paradigm-shifting concepts for evolvable starships."

In 2012 he was a Michael Kalil Endowment for Smart Design Fellow at Parsons in New York. He holds positions at LUCA School of Visual Arts in Ghent, Belgium, and Die Angewandte in Vienna, Austria.

Writer and researcher Joanna Wheeler combines participatory workshops and creative storytelling to help marginalized communities develop strong responses to exclusion.

Tom Wujec studies how we share and absorb information. He's an innovative practitioner of business visualization -- using design and technology to help groups solve problems and understand ideas. He is a Fellow at Autodesk.

Tom Wujec is a Fellow at Autodesk, the makers of design software for engineers, filmmakers, designers. At Autodesk, he has worked on software including SketchBook Pro, PortfolioWall and Maya (which won an Academy Award for its contribution to the film industry). As a Fellow, he helps companies work in the emerging field of business visualization, the art of using images, sketches and infographics to help teams solve complex problems as a group.

He's the author of several books, including Five-Star Mind: Games and Puzzles to Stimulate Your Creativity and Imagination.

Videre co-founder Oren Yakobovich wields the latest covert recording technology to expose and subvert violent oppression.

Using recording technology -- some of it so secret you haven’t heard of it yet -- Videre connects with activists deep within the most repressive regimes to video-document human-rights abuses and expose them to worldwide scrutiny. Yakobovich believes that only action by the oppressed communities themselves will temper the worst excesses of their authoritarian governments. 

Videre's name comes from the Latin expression "videre est credere" -- to see is to believe. Previously, Yakobovich (together with Israeli watchdog group B’Tselem) initiated the camera documentation project, which delivered hundreds of cameras to Palestinians to expose the daily realities of life in the West Bank. 

Chief Tashka Yawanawá represents the critical perspective often missed in the discussions about the future of indigenous people in Brazil: that of the indigenous people themselves.

For Tashka Yawanawá, chief of the Yawanawá people living in the Acre region of Brazil, engagement with the world begins with his people’s right to self-determination and self-worth.

The son of a former leader of the Yawanawá, as a boy Tashka witnessed the near annihilation of his culture by the New Tribes Mission and by the pressure of economic interests. He studied in the United States and visited other indigenous communities. With other tribal leaders in the Amazon, he is working to restore dignity, identity and a sustainable economic future to indigenous populations, founded on their own values, culture and definition of prosperity.

Andy Yen is building an encrypted email program that lets everyone benefit from private communication.

Su Yunsheng creates sustainable designs for the rapidly expanding cities of China, proving that speed doesn’t have to come at the expense of efficiency.

Taking a holistic view of the diverse interests of the urban community, Su Yunsheng seeks a delicate balance between designers, developers, politicians and citizens to bind urban cities into smart, sustainable and energy-efficient spaces. In Yunsheng’s view, technology like the automobile “broke the time and space of the city.” But he believes that technology, whether it’s data mining for energy patterns or building with modular materials, will rehabilitate the urban environment.

He's the Chief engineer of the Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning & Design Institute, he was a planning consultant for the Shanghai 2010 World Expo, and is a co-founder of the Etopia construction platform. He also played a role in launching the influential Urban China Magazine.

Dedicated to increasing awareness about Northern Indian Ocean blue whales, Asha de Vos is also committed to inspiring the next generation of marine biologists.