Theme: Space Between

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized (subject to certain rules and regulations).

McCaw Hall
321 Mercer St
Seattle, Washington, 98108
United States

Acrobatic Conundrum

Terry Crane, Co-Founding Director Terry surrendered to restless urges that lead him to walk calmly away with the circus at the tender age of 20. Since then, his thirst for movement and performance mentoring has been a zigzag constellation of off the beaten path destinations, taking him to the San Francisco Circus Center, Montreal’s National Circus School (of Cirque du Soleil fame), and the Beijing International Acrobatics School. What people are saying: “Imagine a Cirque du Soleil quality performance in an intimate venue…. and you’ll have some idea of what transpires at the Acrobatic Conundrum’s performances.” -Steven Sieden, Huffington Post. Credits: Rope artists: Jenny Atomik Carey Cramer Terry crane Sommer Panage Alex Allan Maureen Frieder Acrobatics: Jacob Skeffington Faith wassman Erica Rubinstein Ty Vennewitz Band Faith stankevich Amy Tung Laurie Miller Stage manager: Susie Williams Videographer: Danny Boulet

Akash Thakkar

Akash Thakkar is an award-winning composer, sound designer, and public speaker within the video game industry. Inspired at a very young age by the background music of his favorite video game, he eventually married his two loves, video games and music, to find his career. He is a graduate from the Berklee College of Music where he was both an instructor and leader of the game audio community. Akash has worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as both a researcher and audio designer and performed with musical legends. He has worked on everything from full orchestral pieces to explosion sound effects for dozens of video game projects. His aim in composing and designing music and sound for video games is to provide a massive emotional impact to everyone who plays them. Akash absolutely loves to share his knowledge and has had the honor of speaking at events and conferences around the world.

Brian Arbogast

Brian Arbogast is the Gates Foundation’s Director of Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Team Global Development Program. He is working on a technology that could lead to the greatest improvements in health and longevity in the developing world. That life-changing technology? The toilet. As part of the Gates Foundation’s efforts to bring groundbreaking innovations in sanitation to the developing world, he’ll share exciting new designs, some already in use, helping to reduce cholera, typhoid, and more. A toilet that needs no water, no plumbing, and creates an end product that can be used in gardens? It is closer to reality than you think.

Dan Diamond

Dr. Diamond always has a bag packed in case of emergencies. And that is because he has been a First Responder to disasters across the globe from Hurricane Katrina to Haiti. Following Hurricane Katrina, he played a strategic role as Director of the Medical Triage Unit at the New Orleans Convention Center. Most recently he responded to the typhoon in the Philippines and he served as the Medical Director for Medical Teams International’s First Response Team to Haiti. In 2010, the American Red Cross gave him the “Real Hero” award and he also received the Washington State Governor’s Award of Excellence for his work in Haiti. In 2014, Dr. Diamond received the President’s Volunteer Service Award from President Obama and he also received the Healthcare Heroes Quality of Care Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Diamond serves as a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and he is a physician at Harrison Urgent Care Clinics.

Dan Finkel

Dan Finkel wants everyone to have fun with math. After completing his Ph.D. in algebraic geometry at the University of Washington, he decided that teaching math was the most important contribution he could make to the world. He has devoted much of his life to understanding and teaching the motivation, history, aesthetics, and deep structure of mathematics. Dan is the Founder and Director of Operations of Math for Love, a Seattle-based organization devoted to transforming how math is taught and learned. A teacher of teachers and students, Dan works with schools, develops curriculum, leads teacher workshops, and gives talks on mathematics and education throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Dan is one of the creators of Prime Climb, the beautiful, colorful, mathematical board game. He contributes regularly to the New York Times Numberplay blog and hosts Seattle’s Julia Robinson Math Festival annually. In his spare time he performs improv comedy in Seattle.

David Schmader

David Schmader is a multi-talented writer, playwright, newspaper columnist, and performance artist. With wit and intelligence he blends personal experience and biting humor to provide insight on difficult cultural issues. He creates autobiographical solo plays that include, Letter to AXL, (homophobia and the unifying power of anger), Straight (“pray away the gay” conversation therapy), and A Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem (angst, escapism, and forgiveness). His shows have toured the country, with productions at New York City’s Dixon Place, Los Angeles’s Highways Performance Space, Seattle’s Bumbershoot Arts Festival, and the Wexner Center of the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.

Deep Dhillon

Deep Dhillon is the chief Technology Officer of Socrata, Inc., a privately-held cloud software company headquartered in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square with offices in Washington, D.C. and London. He is an accomplished technologist with over 18-years of experience conceptualizing, architecting, and deploying multiple advanced networking applications. He specializes in leading startups and growing companies by developing their data science, distributed computing, and search capabilities. Before joining Socrata, Deep served as a technology executive for companies such as Alliance Health Network, Evri, Insightful Corporation (now Tibco), and Cantametrix (now Sony). He holds several patents in natural language processing, and search and music analysis technologies.

Erika Wagner

Erika Wagner is a major player in the field of commercial space ventures and it is not easy to miss her excitement and enthusiasm for the future of space travel by ordinary people. As Business Development Manager for Blue Origin, LLC, a developer of vehicles and technologies to enable human space transportation, she is in the forefront of that field. Erika has served as Senior Director of Exploration Prize Development for the X Prize Foundation and founding Executive Director of X Prize Lab at MIT. At MIT, she also served as Science and Executive Director of the Mars Gravity Biosatellite Program, investigating the physiological effects of reduced gravity. She serves on multiple national and state Science and Aerospace Boards. Erika’s interdisciplinary background includes a bachelor’s in Biomedical Engineering, a master’s in Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a Ph.D. in Bioastronautics. She is also an alumna of the International Space University.

G. Willow Wilson

G. Willow Wilson is an award-winning book and graphic-novel author, best known as one of the women leading the renaissance in female comic superheroes. Her co-creation, Ms. Marvel, a coming of age story about a young Pakistani-American girl in Jersey City discovering and coping with her superpowers, has become a phenomenon. Willow converted to Islam in college and moved to Egypt to teach English. While there she wrote her graphic novel Cairo. She describes her exploration of Egypt and Islam in her memoir, The Butterfly Mosque. Her novel Alf the Unseen was a NYT Notable Book of 2012 and won the World Fantasy Award. She continues her part in revolutionizing comics as one of a four-person team behind A-Force, the first superhero team of Marvel’s Mightiest Women. Willow lives in Seattle with her husband and two daughters where she enjoys British films, cooking, World of Warcraft and has a purple belt in Kajukenbo.

Jesse Hagopian

Jesse Hagopian is best described by the name of his blog, I Am An Educator. He led the historic 2013 boycott of the MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) test at Garfield High in Seattle, an event that set the stage for the growing nationwide opposition to the inundation of standardized student testing from kindergarten through high school. Jesse teaches history and is the adviser to the Black Student Union at Garfield. He is an associate editor for the acclaimed Rethinking Schools magazine and editor of, and contributing author to, More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing. He speaks nationally on the topic and is a founding member of Social Equality Educators (SEE) and has received multiple awards for his initiatives in education In 2015, Jesse was awarded the “Cultural Freedom Fellowship” from the Lannan Foundation for his nationally recognized work in promoting critical thinking and opposing high-stakes testing.

Kinari Webb

Dr. Kinari Webb founded Health In Harmony as a response to the devastation she saw in the rainforests of Borneo. Health In Harmony’s mission is to recognize the inextricable link between human and environmental health and focus on providing healthcare as an incentive to protect natural resources. After completing her medical training, she returned and spent a year traveling around the country looking for ways to help reduce the damage to the rainforest and to the villagers who lived within it. Today, the clinic she founded provides affordable healthcare for the communities of Gunung Palung, and has not just improved the lives of residents, but also introduced alternative income sources and dramatically reduced illegal logging of the rainforest. Dr. Webb was honored with an Ashoka Social Entrepreneur Fellowship in 2014 and the Rainier Arnhold Fellow through the Mulago Foundation in the same year.

Maura O'Neill

Maura O’Neill places innovation at the center of her work, study, and attitude. Through her work in the public, private, and academic sectors, she has created entrepreneurial and public policy solutions for some of the toughest domestic and global problems. She was President Obama’s first Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Counselor to the Administrator at USAID where she had responsibility for leading breakthrough innovations in $22 billion of foreign assistance and development. Maura co-led USAID Forward, the Agency’s major reform initiative as well as created ground-breaking public-private partnerships in supply chain sourcing, mobile money, gender equity, entrepreneurship and new models for sourcing and scaling development interventions. She served on the White House Innovation Cohort assisting the Administration in innovation across the federal government. Maura has started four companies. She teaches Entrepreneurship & Innovation at UC Berkeley.

Megan Ming Francis

Megan Ming Francis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington where she specializes in the study of American politics, race, and the development of constitutional law. She is particularly interested in the construction of rights and citizenship, black political activism, and the post-civil war South. Born and raised in Seattle, WA, she was educated at Garfield High School, Rice University in Houston, and Princeton University where she received her M.A. and her Ph.D. in Politics. In her award winning book, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State, shows that the battle against lynching and mob violence in the first quarter of the 20th century were pivotal to the development of civil rights and the growth of federal court power. She is inspired by people who fight for justice–even when the end appears nowhere in sight.

Neel Baxi

Neel Baxi is a senior at Skyline High School in Sammamish, Washington and an International Baccalaureate Diploma Candidate. The program requires rigorous focus on traditional academic subjects and an exploration of the nature of knowledge through the program’s unique “Theory of Knowledge” course. Neel is surrounded by incredible rigor and constant demand for hard work and perseverance. This is also accompanied by some of the highest levels of stress and anxiety teenagers have ever experienced. The impact the current education system has on Neel and his friends prompted his interest in making schools and student culture better for everyone. He wants to change the way kids approach school and other high-stress environments, as well as the way adults serve as role models for the youth in their lives. In his free time he enjoys playing the guitar and ukulele as well as soccer for both his club, Eastside F.C., and for his high school.

Rusty Rodriguez

Dr. Rusty Rodriguez is a microbiologist who has studied symbiotic interactions between plants and microorganisms for more than 25 years. During that time, he and his team of scientists have discovered that certain types of symbiotic fungi are capable of conferring several benefits to plants including tolerance to drought, salt, and temperature stress. In 2012, Rusty formed the nonprofit company Symbiogenics to pursue basic symbiosis research developing solutions for a sustainable future in the face of global declines in agricultural and natural habitats. He also expanded the company Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies to apply symbiotic technologies to real world problems by developing a series of seed and plant treatment product lines to confer symbiotic benefits to crop plants. Rusty is CEO of both Symbiogenics and Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies and he serves as President of the International Symbiosis Society.

Susie Lee

Susie Lee is a visual artist and the CEO of Siren, the radical new social discovery app which “brings civilized flirting to the dating space.” Her work explores human connections through technology and has been commissioned and collected by numerous institutions including the Denver Art Museum, Mitchell Center for the Arts, Frye Art Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of Art. She has been recognized for a number of awards including Emerging Artist of the Year, Artist to Watch, and the Stranger Genius Award. A graduate of Yale, Columbia and University of Washington with degrees in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, science education, and sculpture. Susie and her most recent endeavor, Siren, have been featured on NPR, The Guardian, CNN, The Stranger, GeekWire, ThinkProgress, Frieze, and Engadget. Siren partnered with Durex on a Youtube campaign with 37 million views and won Geekwire’s App of the Year.

Tanmeet Sethi

Tanmeet Sethi, M.D. is an integrative physician, teacher, writer and mother. She is passionate about Real Medicine, not the kind that comes out of a bottle but the kind that comes from caring for ourselves through Real Food and Real Mind Body Medicine. She has dedicated her career to teaching physicians and patients these ideals. She also teaches food as medicine classes in the community and is starting a new culinary medicine curriculum for resident physicians.

Tom Skerritt

Emmy Award winning actor, writer, and director Tom Skerritt is a much loved resident of Washington State. He worked in his first TV show with director Robert Altman and was cast in the movie M*A*S*H. Other Classic films followed including Alien, A River Runs Through it, Steel Magnolias, Top Gun, and Contact. He continues his stage work on Broadway and appeared on television in “The Good Wife” and “Madam Secretary.” Tom continues to act and write, but his personal interests are now with his family and fostering the creative vibrancy of Seattle. He is one of the founders of The Film School in Seattle, a Mecca for engaging in the art of storytelling. Watching the success of storytelling at The Film School, Tom realized that a similar strategy might help returned veterans deal with PTSD. He founded the Red Badge Project in partnership with Joint Base Lewis McChord to help returning vets reconnect with themselves.

Xolie Morra

The Seattle Band Xolie Morra & The Strange Kind is making a musical presence worldwide. With their appearance on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, their success has been steadily growing strong. Performing with acts such as Crosby Stills & Nash, John Mayer, & the ladies of the 2010 Lilith Fair, the band has built a relationship with a broadening fan base through the years. Along side their success as a band, singer/songwriter Xolie Morra Cogley is an open book and lends herself as an active and available representative of the Autism community, speaking personally about her life with Asperger’s Syndrome. As well as being an out and loud member of the LGBTQ/Intersex community to raise awareness about diversity, equality and acceptance of all people. Through grass roots marketing, hard work, dedication, ambition and pure passion for what she does, Xolie has pushed her way past boundaries to inspire other artists with disabilities to do what they love.