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 2015 Cohort

Director, choreographer, educator

Camille A. Brown
www.camilleabrown.org
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TED Fellows 2011, 2013 Cohort

Photographer

Camille Seaman
Camille Seaman was born in 1969 to a Native American (Shinnecock tribe) father and African American mother. She graduated in 1992 from the State University of New York at Purchase, where she studied photography with Jan Groover and has since taken master workshops with Steve McCurry, Sebastiao Salgado, and Paul Fusco. Her photographs have been published in National Geographic Magazine, Italian Geo, The New York TimesSunday magazine, Newsweek, Outside, Zeit Wissen, Mens Journal, Camera Arts, Issues, PDN, and American Photo among many others, She frequently leads photographic and self-publishing workshops. Her photographs have received many awards including: a National Geographic Award, 2006; and the Critical Mass Top Monograph Award, 2007. She is a TED Senior Fellow (2013) as well as a Stanford Knight Fellow 2013-14.
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TED Fellows 2010 Cohort

Founder - developper

Camilo Rodriguez-Beltran
I'm Mexican and I live a rather nomadic life working in 4 continents, with projects that relate to science and to art. Recently awarded the TED Fellowship (TEDGlobal 2010) I like to participate in the empowerment of marginalized societies particularly in developing countries. My spectrum of applications is wide and range from molecular biology to urban art. The common grounds for my projects are the culture, community and heterogeneity as a base for creation and innovation. I am mostly based in Argentina, the Basque Country and Mexico but work constantly in South America (Brazil, Bolivia) West Africa (Benin, Mali), South East Asia (Malaysia, Philippines) and the Pacific Islands (Solomon Islands). I hold an MSc in Biochemistry and Food Science from INSA, France with a specialization in post genomics. I have worked in scientific research institutions both in France and New Zealand. As a research associate for the University of Canterbury from 2004-2008 I was involved in projects related to molecular biology of horizontal gene transfer and developing capacity on the risk assessment of genetically modified organisms. Since then I've been working as an independent consultant in biosafety, biodiversity and global issues and I participate as an invited speaker in a number of public seminars, conferences, courses and media interviews around the world. Since 2005 I have participated in developing strategies for low cost approaches to molecular biology and since 2007 I have been involved in their application for monitoring of global changes in the form of low cost DNA analysis units used by communities in different parts of the globe. This work has been inspiration for the long feature documentary “Autrement” which I have co-directed in 2009 and that is currently at the post production stage (http://www.autrement.taleo-initiative.org). In 2008 I founded Taleo Initiative (www.taleo-initiative.org) as an idealized system where ideas on global challenges can be conceptualized through observation and alternative thinking. A “tankette” with multidisciplinary actions in the fields of environment, art, science, health and education among others. The same year I founded GKo Gallery (www.gko-gallery.com) as an experimental space for art creation in the Basque Country, where I constanty participate as a curator, co-manager and project coordinator.
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TED Fellows 2011, 2009 Cohort

Artist, designer, urban planner

Candy Chang
Through the activation of public spaces around the world, Taiwanese-American artist Candy Chang creates installations and multi-disciplinary artworks that envision the future of ritual in an increasingly alienating world. Her practice includes participatory installations of anonymous, handwritten reflections, as well as reproductions of these reflections through video and mixed media. She is most known for her participatory public artwork Before I Die, which reimagines how the walls of our cities can help us grapple with mortality and meaning as a community today. Over 5,000 Before I Die walls have been created by communities in over 75 counties, and The Atlantic called it “one of the most creative community projects ever.” She is interested in the future of ritual in public life and merging traditional Asian arts with the modern psyche. She is caretaker of over one million handwritten anxieties, hopes, pains, and moments of grace in the early 21st century.
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TED Fellows 2017 Cohort

Stand-up comic

Carl Joshua Ncube
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TED Fellows 2012 Cohort

Neuroscience PhD student + writer

Carl Schoonover
Carl Schoonover is a neuroscience PhD candidate at Columbia University, and the author of Portraits of the Mind. He has written for The New York Times, Le Figaro, The Huffington Post, Science Magazine, Scientific American, Design Observer, LiveScience, Boing Boing, Commentaire, and cofounded NeuWrite, a collaborative working group for scientists, writers, and those in between. He hosts a radio show on WKCR 89.9FM, which focuses on opera, classical music, and their relationship to the brain. He currently lives in New York City and works on microanatomy and electrophysiology of rodent somatosensory cortex in the Bruno laboratory at Columbia University Medical Center. He is represented by The Wylie Agency.
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TED Fellows 2012 Cohort

Maker

Catarina Mota
Catarina is a maker of things, a research scholar, and an open source advocate. She co-founded the Open Building Institute (open source eco-housing), Open Materials (do-it-yourself smart materials) and AltLab (Lisbon's hackerspace). She researches, designs and teaches hands-on workshops on low-cost eco-house building with the goal of encouraging people to actively participate in the creation of their living environment. Previously, she co-chaired the Open Hardware Summit 2012, served on the board of directors of the Open Source Hardware Association, taught as an adjunct faculty member at ITP-NYU, was a fellow of the National Science and Technology Foundation of Portugal and a member of NYC Resistor. Catarina holds a PhD in communication sciences and her research focuses on the social impact of open and collaborative practices for the development of physical goods and technologies. She is currently the executive director of the Open Building Institute, Research Chair at the Open Source Hardware Association, and a TED Fellow. In 2013 Catarina married TED fellow and open source advocate Marcin Jakubowski.
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TED Fellows 2014 Cohort

science + technology + innovation

Catharine Young
Originally from South Africa, Dr. Catharine Young holds a doctorate degree in Biomedical Sciences and currently serves in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Here she works to advance the Cancer Moonshot - The President and First Lady’s mission to decrease the cancer death rate by 50% over the next 25 years. Her focus on cancer began with serving as the Senior Director of Science Policy at the Biden Cancer Initiative (BCI), a non-profit established in 2017 by then former Vice President Biden, leading efforts to bring together the biotech, technology, science, and academic fields to drive innovative solutions and breakthroughs against cancer. Catharine then served as the Executive Director of a Rare Cancer Advocacy organization, where she advanced policy reform and awareness for all rare cancers. Prior to BCI, Catharine served as the Senior Science and Innovation Policy Advisor and Head of the DC team for the Foreign Ministry of the UK. Following her Postdoctoral training at Cornell University in Biomedical Engineering, Catharine was selected as an American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Technology Policy Fellow in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs. Here she helped lead international engagements on eliminating biological weapons, improving biosafety and biosecurity, and establishing and enhancing biosurveillance capacity, and assisted with the DoD’s response to the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, which she served during the Obama Administration. Awards include being selected as a TED Fellow, a New Voices Fellow of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, and Social Enablers top 100 most inspiring social entrepreneurs. Catharine is an advocate for women in STEM and has been a contributor to major social and media networks including TED-Ed, the Guardian and the UK Science and Innovation Network.
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TED Fellows 2014 Cohort

Attorney + privacy advocate

Catherine Crump
I am an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, at Berkeley Law School. I'm an experienced litigator specializing in constitutional matters, and have represented a broad range of clients seeking to vindicate their First and Fourth Amendment rights. I also have extensive experience litigating to compel the disclosure of government records under the Freedom of Information Act. My primary interest is the impact of new technologies on civil liberties. Representative matters include serving as counsel in the ACLU’s challenge to the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ call records; representing artists, media outlets and others challenging a federal internet censorship law, and representing a variety of clients seeking to invalidate the government’s policy of conducting suspicionless searches of laptops and other electronic devices at the international border. Prior to coming to Berkeley, I was a staff attorney at the ACLU for nearly nine years.
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TED Fellows 2011, 2010 Cohort

Inventor, environmentalist, educator

Cesar Jung-Harada
MA Design Interactions, Royal College of Art; MA Animation Film, École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. Cesar Jung-Harada is an Associate Professor at the Business, Communication and Design Cluster at SIT. He teaches innovation, design thinking, and social entrepreneurship, and mentors ocean engineering projects. Cesar was educated at the Ecole Boulle in Paris, obtained his first Master's from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Animation Film, and his second Master's degree in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Arts in London. Cesar was a Researcher and Project Leader at MIT Senseable City Lab in the USA. Cesar was trained in Design Thinking by George Kembel (co-founder of Stanford d-School), Rapid Prototyping by Tom Chi (co-founder of Google X), and entrepreneurship by Daniel Epstein (Forbes: Top 30 Impact Entrepreneurs). Cesar is the Founder and former Director of "MakerBay", a Hong Kong network of innovation centres. Cesar is the Founder and CEO of the ocean robotic startup "Scoutbots" developing ocean sensors and transport technology to explore and protect the oceans, mostly known for the Open Source shape-shifting sailing robot "Protei" which won the StartmeupHK Grand Award. Cesar's work has been exhibited at the V&A in London, at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, and the team Open _Sailing he led won the Ars Electronica Golden Nica with the concept of the "International Ocean Station" in Austria. Cesar is a TED Senior Fellow and his most popular TED talk has more than 1.8 million views, translated into more than thirty languages. Cesar was the opening plenary speaker of the COP21 (2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference) about ocean innovation before French President Hollande, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and Jack Ma. Cesar is a Trustee of the Board of Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar and the Wyng Foundation in Hong Kong. Cesar's current research includes inclusive ocean innovation, impact invention, social innovation, critical and speculative design, ocean exploration and conservation technologies, and creative community building.
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TED Fellows 2022 Cohort

Queer culture historian

Channing Gerard Joseph
Channing Gerard Joseph (he/him or she/her) is an award-winning journalist and writer of creative nonfiction. He has earned global recognition for his research and writing on African-American LGBTQ+ culture. His groundbreaking work has garnered honors from the American Academy in Berlin, Harvard University's Nieman Foundation, Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, the Whiting Foundation, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the Logan Nonfiction Program. Throughout his career, he has been a staff editor and writer at The New York Times, Associated Press, and elsewhere. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, the Associated Press, The Oxford American, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New York Sun, Entertainment Weekly, U.S. News & World Report, Truthdig, CNN, MTV, and many other periodicals. A leading expert on race and sexuality, Joseph has appeared on the BBC and the CBC and in many other international news outlets. His historical findings have also been noted by the U.S. National Archives and the Smithsonian National Museum for African American History and Culture. He is the author of the forthcoming "House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens — and Changed the World" (Crown, U.S.; Picador, U.K.). Based on Joseph’s original research, the forthcoming book tells the untold life story of William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved Black man who became the earliest-known American queer activist, the world's first-known self-described drag queen, and an early progenitor of contemporary queer ballroom culture. In the 1890s, Swann sought a presidential pardon after being arrested and convicted for holding a drag event — making him the earliest recorded American activist to take specific legal steps to defend the queer community and protest its unjust criminalization. In awarding him the 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, the prize jury wrote: “It is impossible not to be excited about Channing Gerard Joseph’s great feat of historical research: his discovery of William Dorsey Swann, a man born into slavery who went on to establish a culture of drag balls in post-Reconstructionist Washington not unlike those still thriving today, nearly 140 years later. This is crisp and evocative history that cuts across many different fields of inquiry in order to document a riveting story about the function and flourishing of beauty in marginalized communities. Joseph has a talent for accumulating witty, atmospheric details that together create an irresistibly immersive world. Through tireless archival work and in consultation with noted academics, Channing Gerard Joseph complicates and expands our understanding of the history of LGBTQ activism and African American history.” Joseph is queer and gender-expansive and uses he/him and she/her pronouns interchangeably.
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TED Fellows 2009 Cohort

Activist, anthropologist, consultant

Chelsea Shields
Big, bold gender activism w/ serious business & academic chops. TED fellow. Kick-ass consultant. Mom. Applied anthropologist and Placebo expert. Speaking of.....want a pill?
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TED Fellows 2007 Cohort

Epidemiologist

Chikwe Ihekweazu
Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu is currently Assistant Director General at the World Health Organization (WHO) for Surveillance and Health Emergency Intelligence and is leading the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, based in Berlin, Germany. Prior to this, Dr Ihekweazu was the first Director General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and led the agency between July 2016 and October 2021, where he built up this national public health agency from a small unit to leading public health agency in Africa, cooperating closely with the Africa Centres for Disease Control. He acted as Interim Director of the West Africa Regional Centre for Surveillance and Disease Control through 2017. Dr Ihekweazu trained as an infectious disease epidemiologist and has over 25 years’ experience working in senior public health and leadership positions in several national public health institutes, including NCDC, South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), the UK's Health Protection Agency (HPA), and Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI). Dr Ihekweazu has led several short-term engagements for WHO, mainly to build surveillance systems and in response to major infectious disease outbreaks around the world. He was part of the first WHO COVID-19 international mission to China, in February 2020. Dr Ihekweazu is a graduate of the College of Medicine, University of Nigeria and has a Masters in Public Health (MPH) from the Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany. In 2003, he was awarded a Fellowship for the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training (EPIET) and subsequently completed his Public Health specialisation in the UK. He has over 150 publications in medical peer review journals mostly focused on the epidemiology of infectious diseases. Dr Ihekweazu is on the board of the NGOs: African Society of Laboratory Medicine (ASLM), Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS), Public Health Foundation of Nigeria, Health Watch Foundation, Society for Family Health (SFH), Education as a Vaccine (EVA) and he is on the Africa Policy Advisory Board of ONE. He was a TED Fellow, and co-founded and delivered the TEDxEuston event from 2009 to 2019. He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctor of Science (DSc) awarded by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK, the National Productivity Order of Merit and Officer (NPOM) of the Order of the Niger (OON) awarded by the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, for his service to Nigeria.
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TED Fellows 2019 Cohort

Molecular engineer

Chris Bahl
Chris is the co-founder and CSO of AI Proteins, a biotechnology company focused on designing new protein-based medicines, as well as the creation of novel technologies that accelerate drug discovery.
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TED Fellows 2011 Cohort

Chris Woebken
MA Interaction Design, RCA, London / Ted Fellow Chris Woebken uses futuring practices to create props, narratives and visualizations investigating the impacts as well as the aesthetic and social potentials of technologies. He runs workshops and often collaborates with scientists, organizations, artists and engineers to invent and build prototypes of future services and products. He has worked with Natalie Jeremijenko, exhibited at New York City's Museum of Modern Art and has been a frequent guest critic and lecturer at Columbia University, the Rhode Island School of Design and New York City's School of Visual Arts.
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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.