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 2022 Cohort

Legal aid activist

Lam Nguyen Ho
Lam Nguyen Ho is the Executive Director of Beyond Legal Aid (formerly CALA), which he founded with support from the Harvard Law School Public Service Venture Fund, Echoing Green, and Ashoka. Prior to founding CALA, he was a staff attorney at Equip for Equality, where he defended the civil rights of people with disabilities. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Lam joined Legal Aid Chicago through a Skadden Fellowship, he established and ran 10 community-based clinics providing free legal services to youth and their families on the west side of Chicago. He experienced firsthand the challenges of community lawyering and civil legal services, and was inspired to innovatively confront these challenges through the creation of CALA. Lam’s work is deeply-inspired by his personal experience as a queer immigrant from Vietnam, who grew up in poverty in Brockton, MA. He holds additional graduate degrees from Brown University, where he completed its 4-year combined M.A./A.B. program, and the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar and Sub-Dean of Wadham College.
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TED Fellows 2021 Cohort

Education innovator

Larry Irvin, Jr.
Larry Irvin is the chief executive officer for Brothers Empowered to Teach (BE2T), where he ensures the overall vision and culture for BE2T and is the chief fundraiser. Larry is the creator and mastermind of ‘The Cipher’, which is BE2T’s in-house personal and professional development space. Prior to this role, Larry was a former teacher and high-school football coach. Larry has become a member of the Andover Breadloaf Teacher Network and also currently Pahara NextGen Fellow. A New Orleans, Louisiana native, Larry earned his associate’s degree in journalism and media arts from Delgado Community College followed by earning his bachelor’s degree in communication studies with a concentration in rhetorical theory and public address from Louisiana State University. Larry is a 2016 Camelback fellow and is also a member of the WKKF Kellogg Leadership Network. Educational attainment was always a point of emphasis for Larry growing up. Raised by an early childhood educator, Larry’s mother spent 23 years as a teacher for the Jefferson Parish Head Start program. Larry was most inspired by his mother’s perpetual benevolence, which extended from the classroom deep into the community, and Larry continues to adopt those same values through his work.
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TED Fellows 2013, 2011 Cohort

Director + media artist

Lars Jan
LARS JAN is a director, writer, visual artist, and the founding artistic director of EARLY MORNING OPERA (EMO), a genre-bending performance + art lab whose works explore emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience. His works have been presented by The Whitney Museum, Sundance Film Festival, BAM Next Wave Festival, the Istanbul Modern, and Toronto Nuit Blanche Festival among many others. In June 2017, EMO’s public performance & installation, HOLOSCENES, will be exhibited in Times Square. Jan is the son of émigrés from Afghanistan and Poland and is a TED Senior Fellow.
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TED Fellows 2014 Cohort

Photographer

Laura Boushnak
Laura Boushnak is a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian photographer based in Sarajevo. Her work mainly focuses on the Arab world, looking at issues that she finds stem from her own personal experience of gender, education, and aftermath of war. After receiving a degree in Sociology from the Lebanese University in Beirut in 1999, Boushnak infused her interest in social issues with her passion for the visual arts and began her career as a photographer for the Associated Press in Lebanon. She then went on to work with the Agence France-Presse (AFP) at its Middle East hub in Cyprus and its headquarters in Paris. During this nine-year span, Boushnak’s experience included covering hard news in conflict zones such as the war in Iraq and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. As of 2008, she has been working as an independent photographer, commissioned for editorial assignments by the New York Times and other publications, while also giving more of her time to her long-term personal projects in the Middle East. Boushnak’s main focus has been on her on-going projects, “I Read I Write” and “Survivor.” The former revolving around Arab women’s education and literacy, while the latter highlights the aftermath of war and its impact on individuals long after the fighting has ended. Both projects have received honorable awards and recognition including: the first Getty Images/ lean-in editorial grant, The Terry O’neil Photography Award in the UK, and two honorable mentions in the UNICEF Photo of the Year Award. Her work has been part of public and private collections, which include the British Museum, and has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, such as the Birmingham Museum in the UK, the Sharjah Art Museum in the UAE, and The Arp Museum Bahnhof Ralandseck in Germany. Boushnak is a TED fellow and has been invited to give talks in different parts of the world, including two separate TED talks in 2014 and 2016, where she shared the stories behind her “I Read I Write” and “Survivor” projects to a worldwide audience. She is the co-founder of RAWIYA, the first photo collective in the Middle East.
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TED Fellows 2015 Cohort

Computational biologist, activist

Laura Boykin Okalebo
Dr. Laura Boykin Okalebo is TED Senior Fellow, Gifted Citizen and a computational biologist who uses genomics and supercomputing to help smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa control whiteflies and viruses, which have caused devastation of local cassava crops. Her research team uses genetic data to understand the virus and whitefly’s evolution. Boykin Okalebo also works to equip African scientists with a greater knowledge of genomics and high-performance computing skills to tackle future insect outbreaks. Boykin Okalebo completed her PhD in Biology at the University of New Mexico while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group. She was invited to present her lab’s research on whiteflies at the United Nations Solution Summit in New York City for the signing of the Sustainable Development Goals to end extreme poverty by 2030. The team’s latest work to bring portable DNA sequencing to east African farmers has been featured on CNN, BBC World News, BBC Swahili, BBC Technology News, and the TED Fellows Ideas Blog.
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TED Fellows 2018 Cohort

Victims' rights attorney

Laura Dunn
Laura L. Dunn, Esq., advances victims' rights through select legislative and policy efforts as well as direct representation of survivors in campus, criminal and civil systems at the L.L. Dunn Law Firm, PLLC. As a nationally-recognized victim-turned-victims’ rights attorney and social entrepreneur, her work has been featured by National Public Radio, PEOPLE Magazine, Forbes, the National Law Journal, the New York Times, and many more. Dunn is a published legal scholar, an adjunct at Maryland Law, a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Domestic & Sexual Violence and its Criminal Justice Section's Task Force on College Due Process, a liaison to the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code on Sexual Assault and its Student Sexual Misconduct Project, an accomplished litigator who helped win the first-ever recognition of a federal victim-advocate privilege, and an expert witness and consultant on various campus-based gender violence lawsuits nationwide. Dunn has trained countless campus community members, advocates and attorneys on Title IX and the Clery through the Federal Bar Association, the National Association of Women Judges, the College Republican National Committee, the Democratic Attorneys General Association, the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, Harvard Law, Stanford University, the Wisconsin Department of Justice, the Texas Municipal Police Association, the Arkansas Bar Association, the National Association of Victim Rights Attorneys, and many more. While a student at Maryland Law, Dunn interned at the U.S. Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women and the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, and worked as a law clerk for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. She also worked with Congress to pass the 2013 Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act and developed its implementing regulations under the Clery Act through the U.S. Department of Education, which she also worked with on the Obama-era Title IX guidance. For this advocacy, Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy have publicly recognized Dunn. Upon graduation, Dunn founded the survivor-led and DC-based legal organization, SurvJustice. It is still the only national nonprofit representing victims of campus sexual violence in hearings across the country. For her work, Dunn has received a 2015 Echoing Green Global Fellowship, the 2016 Benjamin Cardin Public Service Award, the 2017 Special Courage Award from the U.S. Department of Justice's Office for Victims of Crime, and a 2018 TED Fellowship, along with other honors and recognitions over the years.
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TED Fellows 2016 Cohort

Biomedical entrepreneur

Laura Indolfi
Laura Indolfi is an Italian biomedical entrepreneur, TED Fellow 2016 and co-founder and CEO of PanTher Therapeutics, a start up spun out from Harvard and MIT that provides superior technologies for revolutionizing the treatment of inoperable locally advanced solid tumors. Prior to this she served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the MGH Cancer Center and as a research associate in the Harvard-MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. Laura has broad professional experiences and interests ranging from biomedical engineering, to entrepreneurship and outreaching initiative to promote science. Her scientific expertise covers a broad range of therapeutic areas (cardio, cancer, inflammation, regenerative medicine) and approaches (drug delivery, cell therapy, implanted devices). Together with her strong technical background, she has hands-on business managerial know-hows developed during her biomedical business training at Sloan and Harvard Business Schools and interactions with consulting firms. She strongly believes in the power of outreaching initiatives to promote research awareness and foster the public audience’s discovery of the beauty of science. In 2014 the line of clothes Cytocouture, created in collaboration with Colombian designer Carlos Villamil and inspired by her cell-therapy research, won the global competition Descience. Laura holds a MS/BS degree in materials science and engineering and a PhD in biomaterials from the University “Federico II” of Naples in Italy. Upon graduation, she joined the Harvard-MIT Division of Health, Science and Technology, working on several projects spanning from devices for local drug delivery to tissue engineering approaches for cell therapies.
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TED Fellows 2012 Cohort

Writer, secular chaplain-in-training

Laurel Braitman
Laurel Braitman PhD is a New York Times bestselling author, Director of Writing and Storytelling at Stanford School of Medicine's Medical Arts and Humanities Program and the founder of Writing Medicine, the global community of writing healthcare professionals. Since March 2020, Laurel has helped over 10,000 healthcare workers tell their own stories and those of their patients. Her own writing is on the subjects of mental health, resilience, the natural sciences, and more. She is author of the memoir “What Looks Like Bravery: An epic journey from loss to love” (Simon & Schuster 2023) which Publisher’s Weekly called “perfect for anyone seeking to heal a broken heart.” Her first book, “Animal Madness: Inside their minds”, was a NYT bestseller and has been translated into seven languages. Laurel’s work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, Good Morning America and Al Jazeera. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications. She is a Senior TED Fellow. Laurel splits her time between remote Alaska where her husband runs a 113 year old salmon cannery and her family's commercial citrus and avocado ranch in Southern CA.
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TED Fellows 2019, 2017 Cohort

Paleobiologist

Lauren Sallan
Lauren Sallan is a paleobiologist using cross-disciplinary data analytics and methods to gain insight into the underpinnings of ocean biodiversity and how ecology and evolution operate at scales unobservable by humans (macroevolution). Lauren uses the vast fossil record of fishes as a deep time database, mining to find out why some species persist and diversify while others die off. She has used these methods to discover the lost, largest, 'sixth' mass extinction of vertebrates, reveal how fish heads changed first during their rise to dominance, and show how invasive predators can shift prey evolution at global scales. In Summer 2022, Lauren will become the full-time head of the new Marine Macroevolution Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) an innovative research university that fully supports ideas-driven science. There she will build a international team of cross-disciplinary scientists to investigate the evolution of the oceans and the origins of fish biodiversity. Lauren is currently the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, became a TED Fellow in 2017 and a TED Senior Fellow in 2019. Her research has been published in high-profile venues such as Science, Nature, PNAS, and Current Biology. It has also been featured by The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, the BBC, Forbes, the New Scientist, the Discovery Channel, and the recent popular science book 'The Ends of the World' by Peter Brannen (Harper Collins). Her TED Talks on surviving mass extinction and the evolution of life have received almost 3 million views.
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TED Fellows 2015 Cohort

Poet

Lee Mokobe
LEE MOKOBE is the Founder and Creative Director. Mokobe is a black transqueer poet hailing from Cape Town, South Africa. His work focuses on human rights, LGBTQIA experiences and african history. He is an international award-winning slam poet with a BNV Championship under his belt. A three time TED and TEDx speaker and 2015 Youngest TED Fellow. Mokobe has performed all over the world included at the Barclay's Center, The LGBT Center, LA YouTube Space and Vidcon. His work has been featured by The Fader, Al Jazeera, New York Public Library, Philly.com, Ideas.Ted, Soulpancake media, OkayAfrica and Leeway Foundation. He has also performed alongside and for Sunni Patterson, Talib Kweli, Chance The Rapper, Mos Def, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Sarah Kay and so many more. His work has graced the stages of the National Museum of African American History and Culture as part of a special LGBTQ+ installation where he was the first transgender person to perform and speak on trans people in Africa. He also trail blazed as the first transgender person to be featured in Converse's Forever global campaign. And also featured as a prominent African non-binary leader in Beyonce Knowles And Gucci's Chime for Change as part of The Future is Fluid Campaign. Lee has worked with various non-profit organisations in the United States, especially in youth development. In the teaching artist, advisor and media content creator capacity. He is also well known for teaching workshops over Skype for various youth organisations and schools across the world. Mokobe is currently studying at the University of Cape Town.
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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 2021 Cohort

Medical imaging innovator

Lei Li
Lei Li is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Medical Engineering at Caltech. In 2019, he obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Caltech. His overarching research goal is to develop new medical imaging technology that uses light to visualize brain functions and cancer progression. Toward this goal, he has developed advanced photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT)—an imaging modality that combines light and sound for deep-tissue imaging—to non-invasively visualize wholebody dynamics, study brain functions, detect tumor growth and metastasis, and navigate microrobots inside the body. He also shapes the benchtop system towards a wearable device. These works enable wide-range applications in neuroscience, cancer research, and clinical translation. He is now combining light, sound and artificial intelligence to detect early-stage cancer and better understand the brain.
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TED Fellows 2019 Cohort

Biotech entrepreneur

Leila Pirhaji
Experienced computational biologist and entrepreneur with a Ph.D. from MIT. Founder and CEO at ReviveMed, an award-winning, AI-driven drug discovery platform using metabolomics.
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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Founder & CEO

Lisa Heydlauff
Lisa Heydlauff is the founder & director of Going to School, a creative non-profit trust based in New Delhi that makes media (movies, books, radio) for children to make education relevant to children’s lives and most importantly, lots of fun. Going to School’s journey began with the publication of the children’s book Going to School in India, a celebration of what school can be – from going to school in a tent in the middle of a mud desert, to going to school in the dark with solar lanterns. 500,000 mini books were distributed to Government schools and over 65 million children saw Going to School movies on National Geographic and POGO. Both the books and movies have won international awards. Most recently, Going to School created Girl Stars, 15 movies, books and radio episodes that create icons out of everyday women and girls who have changed their lives by completing their education. Extraordinary tales of ordinary girls, from Anita the Beekeeper to Kiran the Junkyard Dealer, Girl Stars was supported by UNICEF and has been aired on Doordarshan reaching 700 million people. Girl Stars stories have also been incorporated in textbooks that will reach 10 million children. Lisa grew up in England, Canada and the USA, and now calls India home. Going to School was inspired Oliver, age 7, who asked Lisa, his teacher, “What is it like to go to school in India?” Lisa promised that if she ever got the chance, she would find out. Going to School is currently hard at work on their next project, Be! an Entrepreneur – a multimedia project to inspire millions of young people from low income groups to choose to become entrepreneurs and to create businesses that solve the social, economic and environmental problems they face in their lives.
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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Logan Smalley
Founding & Executive Director of TED-Ed, co-creator of Callmeishmael.com and co-author of The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book, and Director of the documentary Darius Goes West (https://youtu.be/Sr5q9wRW9oo). TED Fellow 09’.
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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.