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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Fellows Directory

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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Physicist

Michelle Borkin
I work on creating new approaches to interdisciplinary scientific imaging, data exploration, and image analysis with a focus on 3D visualization. My research includes the application of medical imaging programs to astronomical data as part of the "Astronomical Medicine" project at Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC). I work with the developers of medical visualization tools to improve their effectiveness in multiple scientific disciplines, and collaborate with both astronomers and doctors to help them analyze and visualize their multidimensional data. I am now also working on "Multiscale Hemodynamics" with physicists and cardiologists visualizing the combination of simulation data with real medical imaging to help diagnose and treat heart disease. I graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics in 2006, and am now an Applied Physics Ph.D. candidate at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
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TED Fellows 2017 Cohort

Space physicist

Miho Janvier
Miho is a space physicist at the Institute for Space Astrophysics in France. She studies the Sun's activity and focuses on solar flares, which are big explosions occurring in the Sun's atmosphere. They are at the origin of phenomena called solar storms which impact the space environment of Earth and other planets in the solar system. Solar storms are a fundamental criterion in assessing the habitability of planets in other star systems. Miho's passion for public outreach has led her to develop virtual and augmented reality experiences that appeared at science festivals in the UK and France. Miho developed her passion for astrophysics when she was little: the night sky and its stars fascinated her and this interest grew even more after watching films such as E.T. and the X-Files series. These days, Miho works on computer models of solar flares, comparing them with Sun's observations obtained by spacecrafts. She also works on Solar Orbiter, the European Space Agency's next mission to the Sun.
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TED Fellows 2017 Cohort

Marine biologist

Mike Gil
Dr. Mike Gil, Ph.D., is a marine biologist, a National Geographic Explorer, and a TED Fellow. Dr. Gil has led research expeditions in the Caribbean, French Polynesia and Southeast Asia, from coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and salt marshes to plastic pollution in the middle of the Pacific. His diverse research efforts are unified by a common goal: better understand how natural ecosystems work so that we can better preserve them (and their socioeconomic services) in a changing world. His research findings have been covered by a wide range of national and international media outlets, including: BBC News, CNN, WIRED Magazine, The Economist, CNBC, ABC News, and Discover Magazine. In addition to his scientific research, Dr. Gil is an award-winning science communicator with broad interests in connecting the public with the process of scientific discovery and all that it offers to individuals and to humankind. To this end, Dr. Gil founded and runs a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, SciAll.org, which bring together world-leading scientists of all types to vlog on YouTube. By sharing their personal stories, Dr. Gil and his team aim to humanize scientists, demystify the process of scientific discovery, and make STEM career mentoring accessible to ALL.
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TED Fellows 2018 Cohort

Journalist, writer, filmmaker

Mikhail Zygar
Used to be war correspondent, covered Iraq, Lebanon, Darfur, Palestine, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Ukraine. In 2010 co-founded the only Russian independent news TV-channel Dozhd. The channel survived all the state-sponsored attacks and still exist. In 2015 wrote political best-seller, 'All the Kremlin's Men'
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TED Fellows 2021 Cohort

Mila Turajlic
Mila Turajlic is a documentary filmmaker born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Her most recent film The Other Side of Everything premiered at the Toronto IFF in 2017, and went on to win 32 awards including the prestigious IDFA Award for Best Documentary Film. The film was HBO Europe’s first co-production with Serbia, and had a record-breaking theatrical release in Serbia. Mila's debut documentary film Cinema Komunisto, premiered at IDFA and the Tribeca Film Festival, and went on to win 16 awards including the Gold Hugo at the Chicago Int’l Film Festival in 2011, and the FOCAL Award for Creative Use of Archival Footage. Theatrically released in France, UK, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, "Cinema Komunisto" was broadcast across Europe. She is currently in post-production on The Labudovic Reels. In her work with archives, Mila researches the intersection of personal and national memories, always seeking to reactivate forgotten histories, through forms ranging from lecture performances and video art to analytical essays. In 2018 she was commissioned by MoMA in New York to create a series of archive-based video installations for their landmark exhibition on Yugoslav modernist architecture. Mila has been awarded grants from the Serbian Film Center, CNC-Cinémas du monde (France), EURIMAGES, the Doha Film Institute (Qatar) and the Jan Vrijman Fund (Netherlands). She is an alumnus of Archidoc, Documentary Campus, IDFAcademy and EURODOC. Mila was named a Chicken&Egg Award grantee in 2020. The same year she was invited to join the Documentary Branch of the Academy. Mila teaches documentary film-making and creative archive use at SciencesPo and INASup in Paris. Her films are regularly taught at several US and European universities, and she has been a guest lecturer at universities (Sorbonne, Harvard, Stanford). Mila regularly teaches at documentary film-making workshops (Scottish Documentary Institute, Balkan Discoveries x Balkan Documentary Center, Archidoc x La Fémis). She received her Phd in cinema from the University of Westminster, and her MSc and BSc in Politics and International Relations from the London School of Economics. After obtaining a BA in Film and TV Production at the national film school in Belgrade, Mila specialized in documentary filmmaking at La Fémis in Paris and worked as production assistant and researcher on series for the Discovery Channel and ARTE France, as well as gaining experience on fiction films (“Apocalypto” dir. Mel Gibson, “Fade to Black” dir. Oliver Parker, “Brothers Bloom” dir. Rian Johnson). ​ Mila produced the Magnificent 7 Festival of European Feature Documentary Film in Belgrade since it’s creation in 2005, with the aim of creating an audience for cinematic auteur-driven documentary films in Serbia. She is a founding member of DOKSerbia, the Association of documentary filmmakers of Serbia, and served as the first President of the Board.
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TED Fellows 2010 Cohort

Professora e pesquisadora

Milena Boniolo
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TED Fellows 2013 Cohort

Assistant Professor - Computer Science

Miriah Meyer
Miriah is a USTAR assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah and a faculty member in the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. Her research focuses on the design of visualization systems for helping scientists make sense of complex data. She obtained her bachelors degree in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, and earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah. Prior to joining the faculty at Utah Miriah was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Miriah was named a TED Fellow for 2013, as well as awarded a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship in 2012. She has also been included on MIT Technology Review's TR35 list of the top young innovators and Fast Company's list of the 100 most creative people. She is the recipient of a NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellow award, and an AAAS Mass Media Fellowship that landed her a stint as a science writer for the Chicago Tribune.
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TED Fellows 2010, 2011 Cohort

Architect, designer

Mitchell Joachim
Dr. Joachim is the Co-Founder of Terreform ONE and an Associate Professor of Practice at NYU. Formerly, he was an architect at the offices of Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei. He has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and fellowships with TED, Moshe Safdie, and Martin Society for Sustainability, MIT. He was chosen by Wired magazine for "The Smart List” and selected by Rolling Stone for “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”. Mitchell won many honors including; ARCHITECT R+D Award, AIA New York Urban Design Merit Award, 1st Place International Architecture Award, Victor Papanek Social Design Award, Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability, History Channel Infiniti Award for the City of the Future, and Time magazine’s Best Invention with MIT Smart Cities Car. He's featured as “The NOW 99” in Dwell magazine and “50 Under 50 Innovators of the 21st Century" by Images Publishers. He co-authored three books, "XXL-XS: New Directions in Ecological Design," "Super Cells: Building with Biology," and "Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned". His design work has been exhibited at MoMA and the Venice Biennale. He earned: Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD Harvard University, MArch Columbia University.
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TED Fellows 2018, 2016 Cohort

Mitchell S. Jackson
Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years was praised by publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Times of London. Jackson is the winner of a Whiting Award. His novel also won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include fellowships from the Cullman Center of the NYPL, PEN, the Lannan Foundation, NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts), and The Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, The Paris Review, The New York Times Book Review, and Time Magazine. Jackson is an Assitant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.
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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 2013 Cohort

Neuroscientist & Physician

Mohammad Herzallah
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TED Fellows 2010, 2009 Cohort

Academic Coordinator

Mohammad Tauheed
[Call me TAUHEED, I go by my last name, the pronunciation is just like the spelling, with soft T and soft D] Tauheed is an architect by training, he often transitions into being a web-designer, graphic-designer, photographer, curator, organizer and editor. Currently his primarily role is working as the Academic Coordinator of Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is a unique, transdisciplinary forum for the study and design of the environment, where Tauheed manages the Academic Program with Kazi Khaleed Ashraf and Marina Tabassum. He also organizes the public events of the Institute and edits the newsletter-magazine Vas. Tauheed, became a TED Fellow in 2009, the inaugural class of TED Fellows, and he was awarded a Senior Fellowship in 2010. He has been to 9 TED Conferences in Long Beach, Oxford, Edinburgh, Mysore and other places. He worked for TED HQ as a consultant from 2013 to 2017. Tauheed, was picked by the World Economic Forum to start their Global Shapers Dhaka Hub in 2013. He became the first Global Shaper of the country and started the Dhaka Hub. He is still involved with the projects and activities of the Hub. Among the most notable projects he was working on is the ArchSociety. It's an online community and resource library for architects and students. It's free, open-source; and specially focused to support the architects and designers of the developing nations. He taught himself web-design just to make the portal by himself way back in 2005. As he couldn't afford to hire a web-designer, and he even had no computer of his own at that time, the whole ArchSociety.com was built in cyber-cafes and university computer labs. ArchSociety's nascent project Open Urban Design Think-tank (The OUT) is preparing to develop an "Open archive of solutions and data" to solve the complex urban crises of Dhaka - a city of 18 million people stuffed in a 15x20 km area. The OUT is intended to be replicated in other fast-growing poor cities in the world. [Updated on 4th February, 2018]
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TED Fellows 2014 Cohort

Mohammed Dalwai
Dr Mohammed Dalwai. Mohammed holds an MBChB (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) from University of Stellenbosch. He is passionate about the impact of medicine having worked at Manguzi Hospital a rural hospital in the KwaZulu-Natal province. This led him to join MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres MSF, Doctors without Borders) as an ER doctor in various countries such as Pakistan, Libya and Syria. In 2012, the Mail & Guardian recognized Mohammed as one of South Africas Top 200 young and most interesting people specifically for his groundbreaking work around the South African triage score and its implementation across the developing world. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Emergency Medicine. In 2012 he co founded The Open Medicine Project, an organization aimed at capacitating healthcare workers using mobile technology. Mohammed believes in the accumulative value of individual contributions with the overall imperative of changing the world, one step at time.
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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Founder and Director

Mohan Kandaswamy
Mohan Kandaswamy is the founder of Oriental Aquamarine Biotech India Private Limited; a startup company in Biotech space. The company is working on commercializing the Nitrifying Bioreactor Technology developed at India’s National Centre for Aquatic Animal Health, Cochin. The Nitrifying Bioreactor helps in establishment of Biosecure Recirculation Aquaculture Systems in hatcheries and has multiple applications. This will substantially minimize the water quality problems being faced by any establishment involved in the rearing and maintenance of aquatic species. Closed Recirculating Aquaculture System fitted with the ‘Nitrifying Bioreactor’ actively control water quality and helps maintain reef quality oligotrophic conditions for optimum growth and development of various aquatic species The Nitrifying Bioreactor is the first of its kind in the industry worldwide. The product is patented in India, Thailand, Japan, Philippines, South Korea and Indonesia and has attracted interest from industrial and scientific circles. An alumnus of IIM, Ahmedabad, Mohan also runs a consulting practice. Apart from his professional work, he is an avid swimmer and aquatic enthusiast.
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TED Fellows 2022 Cohort

Human rights champion

Monica Malta
Dr. Malta is a Social Epidemiologist who works in low and middle income countries. During the last 20 years she has been a strong human rights activist, working mostly to address the impact of violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons. In addition to providing resources mitigating the impacts of violence, disease and addiction, Malta advocates for protection for these communities by scholarly research in service of policy change and legal protections. Her studies influenced several key changes in Brazilian policies, including the decision to make homophobia and transphobia hate crimes in 2019. She is the leader of interventions tackling the mental health impact of discrimination and violence among queer women, education initiatives for queer people living in slums, and several mobile health strategies that have improved the access to healthcare, shelter, psychological, social and legal support for thousands of queer people. All her studies include queer people as advisors and employees, aiming at decreasing this population lack of employment opportunities and deep poverty. As a survivor of violence herself, her motto is “Nothing about us, without us”
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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.