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 2009, 2010 Cohort

President & Founder

Alexander Petroff
Petroff was born in the state of Maine, and graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst Massachusetts, where he did his graduation theses on rural economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2005 Petroff founded Working Villages International, an organization aimed at building model villages for a post petroleum world, using the principles of village self-reliance, and concentrated, comprehensive development. In 2006 Petroff started Working Villages first model village in war torn Eastern Congo. Focused intensely on increasing the quality of life, and the happiness of people everywhere, Petroff’s model for development combines sound economic theory with many of the social values of philosophers like Gandhi and Schumacher, to create a sustainable model of rural development for the 21st century.
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TED Fellows 2007 Cohort

Alexandra Graham
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TED Fellows 2019 Cohort

Biologist, filmmaker

Alexis Gambis
Alexis Gambis is a filmmaker and a biologist whose interdisciplinary work aims at transforming the way science is communicated to the public through film and visual arts. He received his PhD in Molecular Biology at The Rockefeller University and a Masters in Fine Arts from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. His first feature film The Fly Room about the birthplace of genetics in New York has toured festivals and academic institutions worldwide ending with a theatrical release in New York, Paris, and Berlin in the fall of 2017. He has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Nature, Cell, TED, and WNYC. At NYU, he teaches in both the Biology and Film departments. His courses combine scientific research and storytelling often featuring animals as actors and blurring the lines between fact and fiction. He is also the founder and executive director of the Imagine Science Films, an annual science film festival now celebrating its 10th anniversary. He also recently launched LABOCINE, a science film platform, research video database and magazine coined by reviewers as the "science new wave." He is currently working on his second feature Son of Monarchs about a boy who wants to turn into a monarch butterfly - it brings together in a narrative drama the themes of evolutionary biology, migration and (im)migration
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TED Fellows 2019 Cohort

Investigative journalist

Ali Al Ibrahim
Ali Al Ibrahim is an investigative journalist, researcher, and the founder of (SIRAJ). With over a decade of experience in the field, he has played a significant role in promoting accountability journalism through his impactful investigations, which have shed light on stories of abuse of power, violations, corruption, and money tracking. Al Ibrahim has collaborated and published with BBC, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project-OCCRP, VICE, Lighthouse Reports, MEE, The Guardian and others. Al Ibrahim was awarded Best Young Journalist Award from BBC 2018. The following year, he received the esteemed Samir Kassir Award for Freedom of the Press , and best investigative journalists according to the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) 2019. He awarded also in Outstanding Investigative Reporting from FJA in 2022 and the AACR June L. Biedler Prize for Cancer Journalism in the United States in 2023. He is a fellow at TED International from 2019 and a consultant at the International Journalists' Network (IJNet) since 2017.
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TED Fellows 2021 Cohort

Health care technology entrepreneur

Alicia Chong Rodriguez
Alicia Chong Rodriguez Health care technology entrepreneur | Costa Rica + Peru Engineer and founder of Bloomer Tech, a company transforming everyday bras into smart medical devices that gather often overlooked data on heart disease in women, a frequently misdiagnosed and under-researched killer. Alicia is the CEO at Bloomer Tech, a company ushering in a new age of personalized healthcare. She graduated from the MIT Electrical Engineering & Computer Science program and MIT IDM, where her research focused on sex-specific, computationally-generated, cardiac biomarkers at the MIT Computational Cardiovascular Research Group. She received the MIT Legatum Fellowship and the MIT Graduate Women of Excellence Award. She has also been recognized as a 2021 TED Fellow, 2018 Medtech Boston 40 under 40 Healthcare Innovator, and in the top 100 Female Founders across the U.S. by Inc Magazine. Prior to MIT she worked in the semiconductor industry at companies such as HP and Teradyne and co-founded MenTe en Acción (Mujeres en Tecnología) where she currently serves on the board as a technical advisor
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TED Fellows 2013 Cohort

Interdisciplinary artist

Alicia Eggert
Alicia Eggert is an American interdisciplinary artist whose work gives material form to language and time, the powerful but invisible forces that shape our realities. She derives her inspiration from physics and philosophy, and her sculptures often co-opt the form and structure of commercial signage to communicate messages that inspire reflection and wonder. Alicia creates flashing neon signs that illuminate the way light travels across space and time, or reveal the relationship between reality and possibility. They have been installed on building rooftops in Philadelphia, on bridges in Amsterdam, and on uninhabited islands in Maine, beckoning us to ponder our place in the world and the role we play in it. Like a navigational sign, Alicia’s artwork asks us to recognize where we are now as individuals and as a society, to identify where we want to be in the future, and to imagine the routes we can take to get there. Alicia's work has been exhibited at notable institutions nationally and internationally, including the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, the Triennale Design Museum in Milan, the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, the Amsterdam Light Festival, the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2012) at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, Sculpture By the Sea in Sydney, Australia, and many more. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Galeria Fernando Santos (Porto, Portugal), The MAC (Dallas, TX), T+H Gallery (Boston, MA), Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA), and Artisphere (Arlington, VA). Alicia’s work is represented by Galeria Fernando Santos in Porto, and Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas. She is currently a Presidential Early Career Professor of Studio Art and the Sculpture Program Coordinator in the College of Visual Arts & Design at the University of North Texas. She lives with her son, Zephyr, in Denton, TX.
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TED Fellows 2014, 2020 Cohort

Journalist, architect

Alison Killing
Alison is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and licensed architect. She works with maps and data on investigations and storytelling projects. Her most recent work is an investigation that used satellite imagery and architectural expertise, as well as interviews with two dozen former prisoners, to identify a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims, together with Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek. This project won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously she created and produced online documentary Migration Trail, a mapped data visualisation that tells the stories of two migrants travelling to Europe in real time, over ten days. She is now working on a series of projects with investigative journalism teams on satellite imagery, surveillance in cities and migration and to develop new reporting tools for investigations. I'm currently setting up a non-profit investigations team. You can find out more here: https://www.killingarchitects.com/support-our-new-investigations-org
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TED Fellows 2020 Cohort

Executive Producer

Almudena Toral
Almudena Toral is a 2020 TED fellow and the Executive Producer at ProPublica, the investigative news organization, where she heads the documentary film and video department. She previously headed the enterprise video team at Univision News Digital – the team covered the U.S. and Latin America through documentaries, photo essays, visuals for interactives and special projects, illustration and animation. Prior to joining Univision, she taught video storytelling at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, pursued her own projects worldwide as a freelance journalist and worked at The New York Times and TIME. Her work has also been published by The Guardian, AlJazeera, VICE, The Intercept, Canal+, NPR, PBS and other outlets. A short documentary Toral produced on children PTSD after the 'zero tolerance' policy was named 2019 World Press Photo Online Video of the Year. Toral's work has also been recognized by four News & Documentary Emmys, four Edward R. Murrow awards, Pictures of the Year International, RFK Human Rights Journalism awards, the Hillman Prize, PDN Photo Annual, the National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism, the Webbys, an Ortega & Gasset award, a Gabo Prize, Rey de España awards, regional Emmys, National Headliner, Deadline Press Club, New York Press Club awards and others. She's a 2020 TED fellow, a 2019 Ochberg fellow at the Dart Center at Columbia University and a 2019-2020 Carter Center fellow. Almudena has also been a grantee of The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the International Women's Media Foundation and The International Reporting Project.
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TED Fellows 2016 Cohort

Civil rights astronaut

Amanda Nguyen
Founder and CEO, Rise. Nominated for 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Written 19 laws. Authored Sexual Assault Survivors' Bill of Rights, which passed US Congress unanimously in 7 months. Spread to 48 other US States, Canada, and Japan. Forbes 30 under 30, Marie Claire 2016 Young Woman of the Year, Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinker, Temptest #1 Woman of Color 2016.
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TED Fellows Cohort

Amanullah Mojadidi
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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Blogger/Author

Amit Varma
Amit Varma is a novelist and blogger based in Mumbai. He has worked in journalism, television and advertising, and has written for publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and Wisden, as well as many Indian publications. He won the Bastiat Prize for Journalism in 2007. He writes the popular blog, India Uncut. His first novel, My Friend Sancho, was published in India in May 2009, and quickly became the biggest selling Indian novel released that summer. He aims to bridge to gap between literary and popular fiction with his novels, and is currently at work on his second book. In April 2009, Business Week named him as one of India’s 50 Most Powerful People.
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TED Fellows 2019 Cohort

Scholar, artist

Amma Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin
JOY All: I am the third daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who came to North America during the height of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Born in Tuskegee, Alabama and raised in Manhattan “The Little Apple,” Kansas, I grew up on university campuses as my childhood playground. I am Dr. Amma — a scholartist* and TED Fellow who transforms history + archival material into entertaining works for theatre, television, and film. A Harvard and NYU-Tisch alum, I “perform the archive” through music, dance, emerging technologies, and more so that nations can come together around difficult histories and face the triumphs and tragedies of our collective past. I have worked across academia and the entertainment industry, including previous stints as a professor and VP / head of Creative Affairs for JusticeRx, a production company that had a two-year overall deal with Warner Bros. TV. I am the founder of the national creative team behind AT BUFFALO, a new musical in development about blackness, American identity, and a presidential assassination at the 1901 Buffalo, NY world’s fair. Have a look at my TED talk on AT BUFFALO: https://www.ted.com/speakers/amma_ghartey_tagoe_kootin When I’m not in a writers room, archive, or rehearsal studio, I am resting. Or, working on creative justice initiatives to make Hollywood a more just space for all. Or, napping. Or, baking gluten-free, vegan desserts. Or, dancing full out to a Afrobeats song. Or, creatively dreaming. I am deeply loved by a fun, multi-generational household filled with my husband, parents, and millennial niece who comes to visit from time to time. Tacos and kelewele are my favorite food. I am exci-TED to meet you (and impressed if you’ve read this far.) Feel free to reach out to me on TEDConnect anytime or find me at a snack station. (*Scholartist coined by Joseph Shahadi and Mila Aponte-Gonzalez.)
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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Amruta Patil
Amruta Patil (born April 19, 1979) is a writer and painter. She is the author of Kari (HarperCollins,’08) and Adi Parva (HarperCollins,’12); and her graphic short stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines around the world. Kari is a contemporary story about friendship, love and death; with a queer protagonist navigating a magic-realism version of Mumbai. Adi Parva is based on the Mahabharat, the Vishnu Puraan and the tradition of oral storytellers. It was selected as one of 2012′s best graphic novels by comic book historian, Paul Gravett. Amruta is currently working on Adi Parva‘s sequel, Sauptik. | Style and Influences | Amruta, who identifies primarily as a writer, has a freewheeling visual style that spans watercolour, charcoal, acrylic painting and collage. Recurring themes in her work include memento mori, sexuality, myth, sustainable living, and the unbroken thread of stories passed down from storyteller to storyteller through the ages. To follow her writing and artwork: http://amrutapatil.blogspot.com
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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Science Consultant

Ana Gabela
After many years as a scientist and teaching biology, I am now focused on supporting women in STEM on a professional and personal basis. For the past two years, I have been working with amazing women in STEM who are often overwhelmed with academic and scientific pressures and demands. Together, we explore how to deal with these pressures and manage their time and schedules efficiently, so they can stay focused on their overarching goal – to continue to design, create and deliver on their scientific initiatives.
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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Futurist, designer

Anab Jain
Anab is Director and Co-founder of critically acclaimed design firm Superflux. The firm works with governments, organisations and communities to translate future uncertainties into present day choices. Superflux’s clients and partners include Govt. of UAE, UNDP, Suncorp, Cabinet Office, Govt. of UK, Microsoft Research, and the V&A Museum. Anab has received awards from ICSID, UNESCO, Geneva Human Rights Festival, Apple Inc., and the UK Government’s Innovation Department. Her work has been shown at MoMA New York, V&A London, Vitra Design Museum and the National Museum of China amongst others. Anab is also Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where she is currently curating a project ‘How Will We Work’ investigating how AI, automation, alternative economies and invisible market forces are transforming the nature of work. Anab sits on the Boards of the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, Media & Journalism at London School of Economics and Participatory City.
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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.