Directory

Step inside the TED Fellows community

Each year, a new group of TED Fellows from around the world, and from every discipline, are welcomed into this international community of remarkable thinkers and doers.

TED Fellows
2024 Cohort

TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

Photojournalist, visual artist

Daro Sulakauri

Photojournalist Daro Sulakauri chronicles social and political issues in the Caucasus. By focusing on issues that are considered taboo, such as early marriages and the impact of Russian occupation, she defends against the erasure of Georgian culture, history and borders.

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TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

Equity bioengineer

Erika Moore

Biomedical engineer Erika Moore Taylor researches how ancestry and sociocultural data affect disease development. Unlike many researchers, she accounts for diverse populations when building regenerative tissue models to create more equitable disease models

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TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

Visual artist, poverty researcher

Huiyi Lin

Huiyi Lin is an economic policy researcher and one-half of Chow and Lin, an artist duo using statistical, mathematical and computational techniques to address food insecurity and poverty. Chow and Lin combine research, design and photography to raise awareness about global inequality in visually arresting ways.

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TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

Medical mythbuster

Joel Bervell

Joel Bervell is a medical student educating people about health care disparities and biases through viral social media content. By sharing stories and studies with his audience of more than one million about the neglect of marginalized groups, he advocates for change in the health care system. 

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TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

Ocean navigator

Lehua Kamalu

Lehua Kamalu is a captain and navigator of traditional Hawaiian ocean-voyaging canoes. She preserves and teaches these ancient sustainable navigation practices by integrating them into digital storytelling and daily life for future generations.

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TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

Health systems entrepreneur

Mohamed Aburawi

Mohamed Aburawi is a surgeon and founder of Speetar, a digital health platform reshaping health care in conflict zones across the Middle East and Africa, especially his native Libya. Through this work, Speetar is helping to dismantle barriers to quality care and advocate for health care as a fundamental human right.

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TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

Mechanical engineer

Norah Magero

Norah Magero is a mechanical engineer and creator of VacciBox, a cold chain solution saving lives in rural communities. She is working to build an Africa that manufactures and produces its own climate-health care technology.

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TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

Chemosensory researcher, nurse

Paule Joseph

Taste and smell researcher Paule Joseph explores how conditions such as COVID-19, obesity, neurodegenerative disorders and substance abuse affect the chemical senses. Her lab combines clinical research, behavioral neuroscience, genomics and molecular biology, offering insights on how taste and smell affect our daily lives.

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TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

AI scientist, entrepreneur

Ramin Hasani

Ramin Hasani is cofounder and CEO of Liquid AI, where he helped invent liquid neural networks: a new AI technology inspired by living brains and physics. These revolutionary networks are more flexible and efficient than current AI solutions, shaping the future of machine learning and artificial intelligence research.

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TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

Wildland firefighter

Royal Ramey

Royal Ramey is the cofounder of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), a nonprofit providing career opportunities to formerly incarcerated firefighters in California. A 12-year wildland firefighter veteran, Ramey draws on his own lived experience, rethinking job training for the formerly incarcerated and addressing the challenges they face re-entering the workforce.

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TED Fellows 2024 Cohort

Composer, artistic director

Sahba Aminikia

Iranian-born composer, pianist and educator Sahba Aminikia is the founder and artistic director of Flying Carpet Children Festival, an annual mobile arts festival and artist residency for refugee children escaping conflict zones.

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2024
Cohort

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TED Fellows 2007 Cohort

Professor

Johnson Urama
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TED Fellows 2010, 2009 Cohort

Investor, data scientist, entrepreneur

Jon Gosier
Jon Gosier is an executive who has spent 10 years building tech companies with a particular focus on data and analytics. He recently Founded Audigent, a company that offers a 'new business model for the music industry' via a platform that provides artists like Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Shakira, Rihanna, Jay-Z, and other entertainers new ways of monetizing data. Among the partners in that company include Warner Music who invested $4 million and a partnership with Nielsen. Prior to that he was digital activist who was a leader at companies like Abayima and Ushahidi which responded to humanitarian crises around the world. He later supported the intelligence community's efforts to preventing radicalization of youth online. Jon is currently producing a film entitled COLLATERAL DATA that is loosely inspired by his years as part of these communities, working in North and East Africa. The original screenplay is a dramatic thriller that explores the relationship between activism and emerging technology. Jon is an alum of Savannah College of Art and Design and the THNK School of Creative Leadership and Innovation. Through the years he has been invited as a guest lecturer and presenter at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Lund University, NYU, Rollins College, Wharton, Temple, Drexel and U Penn.
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TED Fellows 2011 Cohort

Documentary photographer, filmmaker, visual artist

Jon Lowenstein
Jon Lowenstein has been a professional photographer for more than ten years. He specializes in long-term, in-depth projects that confront the realms of power, poverty, and violence. As a documentary photographer, he strives for unsparing clarity, and believes images make a critical contribution by revealing the subjects of history that lack voice. At the core of the work, and by his own admission, is a lighted love of people. An equally intractable believer in the art, he asks those who consider photography unessential to picture a world with no pictures. For more than a decade Jon Lowenstein has traveled, studied, and documented the experiences of undocumented Latin Americans living throughout the United States. Shadow Lives USA follows the migrant trail from Central America, through Mexico and throughout the United States in an effort to portray the real stories of the men and women who make up the largest transnational migration in world history. He has also spent the past decade documenting and working with folks in his community on the South Side of Chicago. This project asks important questions like what does South Side mean? Told by the community with fewer filters, more raw, real, honest and still with an aesthetic that's a personal collaboration between himself and the community where he lives and works South Side becomes a true integrative expression of a uniquely American time and place. This participatory media project seeks to open a new dialogic space in a place that Jon has been documenting for more than a decade. Lowenstein was named a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography and recently was awarded the 2014 Center for Documentary Studies Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor for his photography and writing. He is currently a 2014 TED SENIOR Fellow. Recently, he was named a 2012 Hasselblad Master. In 2008 he was named the Joseph P. Albright Fellow by the Alicia Patterson Foundation and also won a 2007 Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography. He also won a 2007 World Press Award and was named as a USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism Racial Justice Fellowship. He won the 2005 NPPA New America Award, a 2004 World Press photo prize, 2003 Nikon Sabbatical Grant, the 58th National Press Photographer Pictures of the Year Magazine Photographer of the Year Award and Fuji Community Awareness Award. His international assignments include covering elections in Afghanistan to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to social violence in Guatemala. Most recently, he completed a project about the impact of cerebral Malaria in Children in Uganda. He is the founder of the NOOR Documentary Foundation USA.
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TED Fellows 2015 Cohort

Jonathan Home
Born in Newcastle, UK, I grew up playing the violin and football (every break at school).I spent lots of time in my teenage years playing in orchestras, with highlights including playing concertos with local orchestras and later moving into chamber music. I chose to study physics at university in order to make best use of my favourite (and least demanding) school subject, which for me was maths. In Oxford, my interest in the subject blossomed, and chose to continue with a PhD in Oxford with Andrew Steane, working on quantum computation with trapped ions - strings of individual atoms where a quantum bit of information is stored in each and every one. Here I found the connection to experiments inspirational and continually humbling (experiments have a way of "catching you out" every day). Following my PhD, I won a Lindemann Fellowship from the English Speaking Union, allowing me to move as a post-doctoral fellowship to NIST Boulder to work with David Wineland. During 4 years in Dave's research group, I demonstrated the first system capable of performing all the fundamental elements required for a large scale quantum computer, using this to demonstrate that it could be programmed to perform any operation possible. This lays the basis for large-scale quantum computation with ions. Many technical elements of quantum computers are concerned with exploring large quantum states - we applied this to realize the first quantum correlated ("entangled") state of two mechanical oscillators. In 2010, I took up a position at ETH Zurich as an Assistant Professor, and have since built up a research groups with 3 cutting edge experiments, each with unique technical capabilities. My students recently demonstrated for the first time the use of damping to robustly produce special quantum states which constrain the particle below the classical limits, which allowed us to also generate the largest states of a type closely related to the famed "Schrodinger's cat" though experiment. We demonstrated a new method of performing quantum logic gates using active ion transport, providing new opportunities for scaling these systems. In another system, fast CMOS switches have been integrated close to the ion trap, potentially increasing control speed, and we have also developed traps for individual atoms fabricated from optical fibres, with a unique geometry. For the latter, I was awarded the Young Researcher Award of the University of Erlangen Nuremberg in 2013..
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TED Fellows 2014 Cohort

Artist

Jorge Manes Rubio
“There is a nebulous factor that successful artists and Jorge Mañes Rubio have. This factor is a relentless, yet stylish, drive to accomplish something significant, to make a difference, to fulfill a vision—in a big way. It’s inexorable. Jorge recontextualizes the common and overlooked in our society and reveals it to us in a way that makes us know more about what we thought we already understood. And he does it with a warmth or humour that includes us—not excludes or demeans. There’s a compassionate, shared, embracing energy to his art. It draws us in, makes us more aware and more human.”
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TED Fellows 2011 Cohort

Jose Gomez-Marquez
Jose Gomez-Marquez leads the Little Devices Lab @ MIT. The group focuses on empowerment technologies for health including DIY medical technologies kits, crowdsourced diagnostics, paper microfluidics, and health technology in extreme environments. He is co-inventor the MEDIKit platform, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses in developing countries to invent their own medical technologies. Recent projects include a paperfluidic ebola diagnostic kit, the Open Diagnostics Initiative (opendx.mit.edu), and the Ampli platform for modular diagnostics. He has been selected to Technology Review’s TR35, is a TED Fellow and has participated as an expert advisor in the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is part of the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science where he launched the HST MakerLab course to bring patients, data, and kits together. Most recently, Jose co-founded the MakerNurse project to advance nurse innovation in America with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is a co-founder of Pop Up Labs MakerHealth.
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TED Fellows 2014 Cohort

Jose Manuel Moller
Ashoka Fellow and TED Fellow. Im the CEO and founder of Algramo. We want to reduce the cost of living in a sustainable way in partnership with the local groceries store. José Manuel Moller is the CEO & Founder of Algramo. His undergraduate studies were in Business Administration, additionally he also holds a Master of Advanced Design. Since 2013, José has been dedicated to creating and developing Algramo. A TED & Ashoka Fellow, José has won many accolades including: Fast Company Most Innovative Company in Latin America, Chile’s 2017 Top Social Entrepreneur (Schwab Foundation), and he was recently designated a World Economic Forum, Young Global Leader. In few years, with limited investment, he has established Algramo across a network 2,000 stores which has made Algramo operationally profitable. With a vision of transforming the way people consume products, he is disrupting the packaging & consumer goods supply chain industries by adding new technologies & now global brands are incorporating Algramo’s technology into their distribution systems. In the past 4 years, José has brought reusable packaging to 350,000 bottom of the pyramid (BoP) customers and has instilled a reuse culture in the BoP communities Algramo serves-where reuse rates have increased from less than 10% to 85%. José’s vision, leadership & deep network of advisors have led Algramo to a scalable, financially viable high-impact business model that produces world-class social, environmental, and economic benefits for its stakeholders. Recently he has spoken at United Nations Environmental Assembly 4 & at high profile circular economy conferences in Europe. José is honored to be working with global brands to help them use packaging in a more circular manner, to help catalyze reusable packaging systems on a globally significant scale. Doing this will save families on the cost of life’s essentials while keeping packaging in the economy and out of the environment.
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TED Fellows 2011 Cohort

Cellist

Joshua Roman
Joshua Roman, an Arnhold Creative Associate at Juilliard, is a cello soloist and composer hailed for his “effortlessly expressive tone… and playful zest for exploration” (New York Times), as well as his “extraordinary technical and musical gifts" and “blend of precision and almost improvisatory freedom… that goes straight to the heart" (San Francisco Chronicle). His genre-bending programs and wide-ranging collaborations have grown out of an “enthusiasm for musical evolution that is as contagious as his love for the classics" (Seattle Times). As a soloist, Roman’s “exceptionally high quality of performances” (LA Times) combines “the expressive control of Casals with the creative individuality and virtuoso flair of Hendrix himself” (Gramophone). He has performed with leading orchestras around the world, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony, Toronto Symphony, among others, and, was principal cellist at Seattle Symphony from age 22 to 24. Recent career highlights include his sold-out ‘Well-Being Concert’ at Carnegie Hall in December 2023, and the launch of his intimate musical exploration project Immunity, a program combining performance and storytelling to confront the impact of the long-COVID that nearly ended his career. As a composer, he has been commissioned by Music Academy of the West, Illinois Philharmonic, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, Grace Cathedral, and more, and he has written for the JACK Quartet, violinist Vadim Gluzman, and conductor David Danzmayr. Equally accomplished as an interpreter of the music of other contemporary composers, Roman has premiered works by Mason Bates, Reena Esmail, Timo Andres, Gabriela Lena Frank, Aaron Jay Kernis, Lisa Bielawa, and others. A native of Oklahoma City, Roman studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music with Richard Aaron and Desmond Hoebig. Roman plays an 1830 Giovanni Francesco Pressenda on a generous loan through The Stradivari Society of Chicago.
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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Owner

Joshua Wanyama
Joshua Wanyama is the co-founder and CEO of Pamoja Media. Pamoja Media is Africa’s first online advertising network selling banner and rich-media advertising to marketers seeking to reach Africans worldwide. In this position Wanyama has overall responsibility for leading the company. He oversees day to day operations and growth of Pamoja Media including relationships with advertising agencies, publishers and vendors. Wanyama previously served as editor and publisher of African Path, an online African portal that allows Africans to tell their stories through blogs and regular news reporting. Wanyama relinquished the editorial position in 2008 and currently serves as the portal’s president driving its vision and direction. Since its inception in August of 2008, Pamoja Media has proved its value to publishers by working with some of Africa’s major publications including the Nation Media Group of Kenya, Mmegi of Botswana, Sahara Reporters of Nigeria, Mail & Guardian of South Africa and Sudanese Online amongst others. In October of 2008, Pamoja Media started representing Yahoo’s Network in Africa selling its inventory to marketers within the continent. Pamoja Media today boasts a reach of 35 million Africans worldwide through its network and Yahoo. A web enthusiast and designer, Wanyama previously run the boutique web design and development firm Spectrum Interactive Media, now News Portal Inc. in Minneapolis. During this time, he worked with clients to provide branding and online marketing expertise to enable them to better position their companies in an interactive world. As the newspaper industry became hard hit with the drive towards digital reporting, the company developed an online content management solution that enables a publisher to quickly scale up their operations efficiently. Wanyama earned a degree in architecture at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2003.
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TED Fellows 2015 Cohort

Jost Franko
Jošt Franko is a young documentary photographer born in Slovenia in 1993. His work is mostly focused on long-term projects exploring domestic and international social issues, and his themes often touch on the loss of traditional values in the modern world. He believes that his youth and curiosity drive him to pick up themes that are easily and often overlooked. Franko’s work has been among others published by Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Sunday Times Magazine, Washington Post, Al Jazeera America, Daily Beast, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, National Geographic Slovenia and exhibited in London, New York City, Tel Aviv, Lisbon and Ljubljana. By the age of 16, Franko won the Slovenia Press Photo reportage of the year award and later on joined VII Mentor Program, as the youngest member ever to be affiliated with VII. He works closely with Christopher Morris, who is intrigued by Franko’s style and describes it as a very unique and lost from of visualizing in photojournalism. In 2014, Franko was awarded an annual Watchdog prize (special achievements in journalism) for his documentary photography by Slovenian Association of Journalists.
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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Veteran aid worker

Joy Sun
Joy is Co-Founder of Groups, a venture-backed healthcare services company that provides affordable, evidence-based treatment for heroin and opioid addiction. Groups operates primarily in rural communities that have been hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, yet have the least access to high-quality treatment. Previously Joy served as GiveDirectly's Domestic Chief Operating Officer, where she helped to make cash transfers a new benchmark for efficiency, transparency, and impact in giving and international aid. She was a manager at McKinsey & Company and served clients in the healthcare and agriculture sectors. She has also served as Director of Operations at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, where she launched several field operations across Africa, including Lesotho, Swaziland, and Nigeria, and helped lead the organization's growth from a start-up into a global institution. Joy holds an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business and a BS from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service.
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TED Fellows 2009, 2010 Cohort

Biologist

Juliana Machado Ferreira
Contributing to the great effort taken by many people, agencies and organizations to combat wildlife trafficking and prevent its harmful impacts is the reason why Brazilian-born biologist Juliana Machado Ferreira has devoted her life to this issue since 2005. She is currently the Executive Director of the non profit organization Freeland Brasil, whose mission is to conserve biodiversity by ending wildlife trafficking. Freeland Brasil works in partnership with Freeland Foundation, based in Bangkok, an internationally respected counter wildlife trafficking and counter human trafficking organization. As Freeland Brasil’s Executive Director, she coordinates projects which can be divided in three categories: (1) reduce demand for wild pets and wildlife parts and products through educational efforts and awareness actions; (2) support to law enforcement against wildlife trafficking, international articulation and facilitation for the development of a regional wildlife enforcement network; and (3) development of scientific research to produce tools for law enforcement use, such as DNA paternity exclusion tests as a way to control the activity of legalized wildlife commercial breeders. Dr Ferreira’s main life’s project is to set up an Independent Wildlife Forensics Laboratory in Brazil to develop dedicated research and perform high quality forensic analyzes on wildlife crime related evidence to all South American countries. Dr Ferreira’s background is in Science. As a white-lab-coat researcher, she completed her Ph.D in Genetics in 2012 with the dissertation: “Contribution of Population Genetics to the Investigation Efforts on Wildlife Trafficking in Brazil: Development of Microsatellites and Analysis of the Genetic Structure of Paroaria dominicana and Saltator simiis (Aves: Passeriformes: Thraupidae)”. Her main goal in this area is to produce high quality scientific data which can be used in issues involving wildlife trafficking, its prevention and mitigation of its impacts. Her greatest scientific passion is the use of Forensic Science in the prosecution of wildlife related cases, and this is why she has gone to the US Fish and Wildlife Service National Forensics Laboratory to learn about Wildlife Forensics, first as a volunteer and later as a visiting scientist, to develop research in collaboration between 2005 and 2013. Before creating Freeland Brasil, Dr Ferreira has volunteered (2007-2014) for the organization SOS Fauna, a beacon of the fight against wildlife trafficking in Brazil. With the organization, she joined the police in raids intended to seize illegally traded wild animals (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvmOO-bR2cw), in which the team developed actions with the Police aiming at bringing down wildlife trafficking criminal organizations, as well as helped officers on the ground to identify the species of illegally owned or traded animals (for example, hybrids are allowed to be kept and bred, while wild species and threatened wild species have higher levels of protection). They also provided necessary care to the animals in the post-seizure period to decrease death rate and enhance their chances of being rehabilitated and even reintegrated to nature. With SOS Fauna Dr Ferreira also took part in the rehabilitation and responsible releases of rehabilitated animals back in the wild (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHcrcgMkW8o). Lastly, because of the unique and pioneer character of her Ph.D research in Brazil, which united field work, on-the-ground work with the Police, and genetics laboratory work to analyze issues involved in wildlife trafficking, and due to her ideas on how to combat wildlife trafficking in different fronts in South America, Dr Ferreira was nominated a 2009 TED Fellow and 2010-2012 TED Senior Fellow and she gave a talk on the 2010 TED Conference which was posted on TED.com: http://www.ted.com/talks/juliana_machado_ferreira.html. She was also laureate a 2014 National Geographic Emerging Explorer: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/explorers-project/141227-explorers-ferreira and http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/ng-live/ferreira-birds-lecture-nglive Her greatest passions are to spend time with her family, specially her husband and her two year-old daughter, to travel and see the world’s nature and biodiversity, to read, to swim and to practice Yôga. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/bios/juliana-machado-ferreira/ http://www.ted.com/profiles/113826/fellow www.freelandbrasil.org.br http://www.scienceinschool.org/2012/issue24/juliana http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/129455-why-the-caged-bird-sings/ http://www.oprah.com/blogs/One-Womans-Fight-to-Keep-Brazils-Wild-Birds-Aloft http://womeninbusiness.about.com/od/joe-hefferon-series/a/Profile-Of-Brazilian-Biologist-and-Angel-Juliana-Machado-Ferreira-Phd.htm http://www.laurelneme.com/index.php/the-wildlife-radio-show/264-brazil-illegal-bird-trade-juliana-machado-ferreira http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/juliana-machado-ferreira-wildlife-trafficking-warrior/33115
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TED Fellows 2009, 2010 Cohort

Tech entrepreneur

Juliana Rotich
I am a Fintech leader and technology entrepreneur of repute, keynote speaker, consultant, advisor and Board Member/Advisor with years of experience spearheading and scaling technology companies; operating in markets domestic and international. My personal mantra is to build impactful technology, fix problems, and help others. I enjoy forging powerful partnerships to accomplish transformational projects and provide opportunities for innovators in East Africa. Wherever technology and science can help to do these three things and accelerate progress, I also enjoy figuring out that intersection and adding constructive value. I champion for internet connectivity, science education, Learning Lions in Turkana and works to support entrepreneurs to scale their work and impact. I also am an angel investor in FinTech and other startups. Contact Me No
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TED Fellows 2011, 2013 Cohort

Julie Freeman
Julie is an artist and computer scientist who works with data differently. She uses it as an art material to create novel audio visual experiences. Her work includes large-scale installations, kinetic sculptures and online animations which explores how we perceive the relationship between technology, science and nature. She is passionate about understanding the less obvious elements of our world, and about how art can incorporate science and technology to inform our perspective of these unseen layers. Julie is a co-founder of Fine Acts which brings together activists and artists to work on collaborative projects which focus on human rights and social issues. fineacts.co Based in the UK, Julie holds a PhD in Data as an Art Material from Queen Mary University of London. She leads the Data as Culture art programme at the Open Data Institute (founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt), commissioning and exhibiting data art. Instagram @juliefreeman_artist
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TED Fellows 2009, 2010 Cohort

Founder & CEO

Juliette LaMontagne
Juliette LaMontagne, Ed.D., spent fifteen years piloting learning experiments with the New York City Department of Education – as a classroom teacher, professional developer, and teacher trainer. Her innovative work in education is recognized by TED, where she is a Senior Fellow and the Institute of Design at Stanford University where she is a d.fellow. She was named to the Public Interest 100 in 2012 and received excellence in teaching awards from Columbia University, Teachers College where she was a Lecturer from 1999-2004. In 2011 she founded Breaker to close the gap between education and employment. Breaker uses business design challenges to train young people for the new economy.
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Fellows Talks

We’ve organized Fellows talks into curated playlists to make it easier to find content you’re interested in.

TED Fellows impact at a glance

Change that gets noticed

200M

200M people impacted by Fellows work annually

451M

451M TED Talk views

2,234

2,234 articles published by/about Fellows per year

1,303

1,303 speaking engagements each year

234

234 businesses launched

The groundbreaking work of a TED Fellow does not stay in the shadows. Each year we study the impact Fellows have on their respective fields, as measured by tangible forms of recognition. Here are some highlights from the past few years.

Our purpose

What makes a TED Fellow?

TED Fellows are some of the brightest, most ambitious thinkers, future-shapers and culture-shakers from nearly every discipline and corner of the world.

Whether it’s discovering new galaxies, leading social movements or making waves in environmental conservation, with the support of TED, Fellows are dedicated to making the world a better place through their innovative work. In 2024 the program will shift to a nomination-based application process.

Qualifications

We look for the proximate emerging leaders working on-the-ground on world-changing ideas -- the doers, makers, inventors, technologists, filmmakers and photographers, musicians and artists, educators, scientists, entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, and human rights activists. Here is what we look for in a TED Fellow:

1

Emerging leaders. We focus our efforts on individuals who are in the earlier phases of their career, those who have a track record of excellence but have not received a numerous other fellowships and accolades. We search for those who are not already on the global stage.

2

Originality and authenticity. We look for proximate leaders with a unique approach to solving humanity’s greatest challenges. We look for the people working on-the-ground on world-changing ideas, putting ideas into action.

3

Kind, collaborative character. We look for individuals who have an early track record of great work in their field. We look for individuals from all disciplines, who have collaborative, kind personalities. Many Fellows claim that the community of other Fellows is the most valuable aspect of the fellowship. We try to nurture this collaborative spirit in the community.

4

Poised to grow. Since this is not a granting fellowship, we look for individuals who would best be able to use the TED community and this opportunity as a launching pad. The TED Fellowship is best for candidates who are prepared to grow with TED’s forms of support: amplification, network-building, communication training, professional development coaching and mentoring.