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I am a king cobra conservationist studying king cobras for two decades. MY WORK: My Ph.D. study reconstructs the biogeographic history of king cobras in Southeast Asia demarcating them into more than one species. I regularly rescue king cobras from distress situations which helps both humans and the king cobra. I conduct specialized workshops called Scientific Training On Reptile Management(STORM) and the King Cobra Bionomics for varied audiences to create awareness and garner support for king cobra conservation. PUBLICATIONS: I have authored and co-authored 15 peer-reviewed scientific papers on king cobras where six were part of a special issue for the 'Hamadryad', a herpetological journal. WILDLIFE DOCUMENTARIES My work has been documented most recently in a wildlife documentary titled, 'Cobra King' on NatGeoWild and Smithsonian Channels respectively. I also feature in wildlife documentaries like the King Cobra and I, Secrets of the King Cobra, One million snake bites, Asia's deadliest snakes, Wildest India, Wild India and Mysteries of Wild India by channels like the BBC, Discovery, NatGeo Wild, Animal Planet, Smithsonian and the National Geographic Channel. ORGANIZATIONS I run two organizations-Kalinga Centre for Rainforest Ecology and Kalinga Foundation (named 'Kaalinga' i.e. king cobra in Kannada) which are an environmental education company and a non-profit organization respectively. Both organizations are based out of Agumbe, Karnataka, India.

Greg Gage is a neuroscientist, engineer and the CEO of Backyard Brains. Greg develops tools, curriculum and experiments that allow the general public participate, hands-on, in neural discovery. He is senior fellow at TED and has given many TED talks (9 online), received the director's innovation award as an investigator at the National Institute of Health (NIH), and was recognized in a White House ceremony for being Obama’s Champion of Change for his commitment to citizen science. In his free time, he enjoys changing diapers of his 2 young daughters.

Computational biologist from Venezuela, trying to fund low cost DNA testing for rural communities.

Harinjaka Andriankoto RATOZAMANANA is a media pioneer based in Antananarivo Madagascar. In 2007 his work caught the attention of senior management at TED.com (Technology, Entertainment and Design) which offered him a global fellowship recognizing his role as “...an outstanding young developing world leader who has demonstrated outstanding achievement and potential...”

Heejae is the founder and CEO of TalkingPoints, an education technology nonprofit with the mission to drive student success by unlocking the potential of families to fuel their children’s learning, especially in underserved communities. She founded TalkingPoints because of her own experience growing up as a Korean immigrant student and seeing her mother be able to make a difference in her education because she had the ‘voice’ to do so. TalkingPoints’ universal family engagement solution transforms something as simple as a cell phone into a tool that empowers millions of PK-12 families and educators to build strong partnerships in support of student success through two-way translated digital conversations, data analytics, and resources in 150+ languages. Previously, Heejae advised the Gates Foundation and Teach First UK at McKinsey & Company, and worked on education reform by serving as chief of staff to a special advisor to the Secretary of Education in the UK. She holds a B.A. from Oxford University, an M.A. from the London School of Economics both with distinctive honors, and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was an Arjay Miller Scholar. Heejae has been recognized as a 2022 TED Fellow, Forbes 30 Under 30 for Education, Echoing Green Fellow, Stanford Social Innovation Fellow, Ashoka Changemaker, and Elevate Prize Winner, among others.

Scientist, MPhil Cambridge, PhD Oxford. Ethology of human apes & other social animals. I explore & integrate, bonobos laugh. Gruter & TED Fellow. Chile’s Presidential advisor on strategy for science, innovation, technology and knowledge. Love nature & culture, wildness & arts. Based in NYC & Chile. Instagram: isabel_behncke —— Long bio: What makes us human? What does it really mean to be a social animal? And how can these Q’s help humans live win-win with the rest of nature? Knowing our past help us situate our present - & co-create our future. Looking at other animals help us understand ourselves - & our place in the web of life. I am an explorer ethologist by training and essence. I like going to the field, & attempting to look at life at the eye - with my own eyes. To be a story-watcher, to let the complexity of life unfold. I ask questions, travel, observe, think, integrate, & then tell people what I found. I go there, and back. Voy, y vuelvo. I am from Chile, where I learnt to love mountains, exploration & wild things. I was educated in the UK (Oxford, Cambridge & University College London) in behaviour, evolution & ecology. In deep time, complexity, living systems. And a hearty side of British influences, from the Lunar Society to Monty Python & Eddie Izzard. I started working in rainforest conservation in Northern Patagonia. Frustration with our failure to look after nature made me want to understand human nature better - & go back to origins. I then trained as a field primatologist working on the evolutionary roots of social behavior in humans & other animals. Field research led me to walk 3,000+ km in the steamy jungles of Congo observing the social behavior of wild bonobo apes - our closest living relatives. For my PhD I did the first comprehensive study of adult play of bonobos in the wild. The research site was Japanese-directed Wamba, DRC, longest running bonobo site in the world. Chronic bloodshed in Congo meant that at the time I was the first western person to do research there in more than 20 years. Paradox happens to me a lot. Like going into the Heart of Darkness to study play. Or studying matriarchal & most peaceful of great apes -they don't tend to die at the hands of their conspecifics- in a country torn by sexual violence & war. Soon after Congo went to Burning Man & realised it was also adult play of apes in the wild. Instead of jungle, it was desert. Instead of knuckle-walking hairy apes, there were biped naked apes. I continue going every year; collective phenomena make great primatology field-sites. I cannot undo seeing us as social animals. We are embedded in societies & in nature. In my research I saw that play behaviour is like our 'Adaptive Joker' - an ancient wildcard which changes value according to context. It might hold the key to our capacity to adapt to a changing world. The biology of fun is serious business. I apply an evolutionary & complex systems lens to try derive insights onto human behaviour & the modern challenges we face. I ask questions such as why we go to festivals, how can we design rituals for modern life, why trust requires risk-taking, & crucially why is it that the more digital we get, the more understanding of nature (& human nature) we need. Basically I use the Origin of Species to think about the Future of Species. I am currently working on my first book, which is science (human evolution, ethology & primatology) told through adventure travel (field diaries written while in Congo jungle) & sprinkled with classic rock references. Would love to hit notes in an ancient fireside non-fiction storytelling, but with the Rolling Stones, Latin poetic-realism & Darwin as part of the hearth. I enjoy public engagement in different forms (e.g. TED, WIRED, UN, G20, BBC, Nat Geo), concerning questions of how humans & other animals create, connect, play & adapt. Sometimes I curate & co-host 'intellectual safaris' (expeditions of intellectual & geographic exploration) academic conferences & ideas festivals. I like collaborating with thinkers, doers, artists, scientists, explorers. I lived 15 years in the UK (including 3 years of fieldwork in Congo). Now I'm based in NYC & Chile. Night owl, animal person, occasional flaneuse. No allergies. I love reality and the complexity of the world, and think we would be better off embracing it rather than trying to reduce it. I think context, interactions, & trade-offs. Exploration-then-integration is my favored methodology. I am an Associate Professor at the Research Centre for Social Complexity (CICS) in UDD, Santiago Chile, & Fellow of the Bay area based Gruter Institute for research on human behavior & institutions. I’m advising government in my home country. I’m Presidential advisor for Chile’s long term strategy in science, technology, innovation & knowledge. BSc Zoology (UCL), MSc Wildlife Conservation (UCL), MPhil Human Evolution (Cambridge), DPhil Evolutionary Anthropology (Oxford). Gruter & TED Fellow.

Isadora Kosofsky is a documentary photographer, journalist, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Albuquerque. She began photographing at the age of fourteen, documenting individuals in hospice care. When she was sixteen, she relocated to the Balkans to imbed inside the youth prison system in Romania. Isadora takes an immersive approach to visual storytelling, spending months and years imbedded in the lives of the people she shadows. For her, the relationships formed with the subjects are tantamount to the image-making. She works on a range of subject matters through the lens of one individual or group of people, working from an interpersonal, humanistic stance, while documenting healthcare, geriatric health, mental health, disability rights, impacts of incarceration, substance use, gender violences, childhood trauma, senior citizen issues, and experiences of grief, loss, and resilience. She is a National Geographic Photographer and has contributed to the NY Times, TIME, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Stern, Le Monde, M le Magazine du Monde, GEO Germany, Paris Match, The London Sunday Times, The Guardian, Slate, Internazionale, and many others. She is the recipient of the 2012 Inge Morath Award from the Magnum Foundation for her multi-series work on the aged. She was nominated for a 2016 Lead Award (German Pulitzer) for her long-term documentary about a senior citizen love triangle. She was a participant in the 2014 Joop Swart Masterclass of World Press Photo. Her work has received distinctions from Flash Forward Magenta Foundation, Ian Parry Foundation, Social Documentary Network, International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Women in Photography International, Prix de la Photographie Paris, The New York Photo Festival and others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and can be found in Family Photography Now (Thames and Hudson, 2016), a photographic anthology, and in Public Private Portraiture from Mossless. She had an exhibition of her work on youth facing incarceration and their families at the 2017 Visa Pour L’Image International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France. She is the recipient of a 2017 Getty Images Instagram Grant for elevating the stories of marginalized communities. Her storytelling has also been used for public policy, doubling the budget of a program to connect children with their incarcerated parent; her work has been used as evidence for the need for additional rights for women in prison through the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act, a congressional bill. In addition, she is a teacher and has lectured at the National Geographic Photography Seminar, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Ohio University School of Visual Communication, Loyola Marymount University, Harold Washington College, the National Conference on Crime and Delinquency, and has instructed high school students on topics related to the language of empathy, working intimately with subjects, and trauma studies; she is an instructor in critical visual journalism with the Connected Academy, sponsored by the World Press Photo Foundation. She holds a B.A. in Gender Studies from University of California Los Angeles. She is a recipient of a 2018 Grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting for her ongoing work on girl survivors of complex trauma. The Royal Photo Society recently named her one of a hundred “heroines” in photography worldwide. Isadora is a TED Fellow, part of a network of 450 global change makers, and gave a talk at TED 2018 in Vancouver. She is a 2020 Gwen Ifill Mentor through the International Women’s Media Foundation. Her first monograph, Senior Love Triangle, was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2020.

I'm a lawyer and a legal scholar focusing on migrant and refugee rights. I teach at the University of Haifa, Faculty of Law, and am a co-founder of the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), a London-based human rights group. I have also taught in Washington DC, London and Berlin. My book, Humanity at Sea, was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press.

Biologist, PhD in Neuroscience, Fulbright Alumna, working in the field of stem cells and tissue engineering (TE), particularly on electrospinning and 3D bioprinting. Published 2 books of poetry in Serbian, "Demoni" ("Demons") and "Klinasto pismo" ("Cuneiform script"). Received the "Strazilovo" award at the literary manifestation "Brankovo kolo" in Sremski Karlovci 2008, for "Klinasto pismo". Serbian-English poetry book - in preparation. Founder of Fab Initiative - non-profit organization working on establishing fab labs in South East Europe and promoting entrepreneurship in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics). Founder at Pubsonic - web application for interactive graphical presentation of the open-access biomedical data. Reviewer for the Journal of Visual Experiments (JoVE); the Tissue Engineering; PLoS One TEDGlobal Fellow 2012 Young Scientist at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of New Champions, Tianjin, 2014. Represented Young Scientists community at the Plenary Session: http://www.weforum.org/sessions/summary/new-champions-plenary-creating-value-through-innovation