Theme: Securing Our Future

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).

Sternberger Auditorium at Guilford College
5800 West Friendly Ave
Greensboro, North Carolina, 27410
United States

Aleksander Skardal

Dr. Skardal is an Assistant Professor at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, with cross-appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Cancer Biology, and is a member of the Tumor Progression and Recurrence Program, Gastrointestinal Disease-Oriented Group, and Brain Tumor Center of Excellence at the Comprehensive Cancer Center of Wake Forest Baptist Medical. Dr. Skardal has an interest in using biofabrication/bioprinting and material science technologies to create in vitro model systems of various organs and cancers, which can be used to for modeling pathologies, personalized medicine, and drug and toxicology screening. Additionally, Dr. Skardal has employed his biomaterial and bioprinting expertise in applications of wound regeneration.

Antoine Williams

Antoine Williams’ mixed media installations, paintings and collages are an investigation of his cultural identity through the exploration of the perception of signs within society. Heavily influenced by science fiction, hip hop, and his rural working class upbringing in Red Springs, North Carolina, Antoine has created his own mythology of hybrid creatures that exist between the boundaries of class and race. Antoine is an artist educator who received his BFA from UNC-Charlotte. Afterwards, he helped start a local art collective in Charlotte where he did a number community-based art projects, such after school programs, rap concerts, murals, and pop up art shows. In 2014 Antoine received his MFA from the UNC-Chapel Hill. Now he lives in Chapel Hill, where he continues his studio practice and is an assistant art professor at Guilford College.

Brian Lampkin

Brian Lampkin is an owner of Scuppernong Books and lives in Greensboro with his wife and twin daughters. He is the former owner/founder of Rust Belt Books in Buffalo, NY where he also founded The Real Dream Cabaret and various other performance/political prank collaborations. He is currently a member of the anti-meta, neo-beat, electronic garage gospel trio The Difficulties, and writes occasional songs for Joy On Fire, No Illusions and other groups.

Charles Smutny

Dr. Charles J. Smutny III is Assistant Professor of Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina. A passionate advocate of osteopathic medicine, Charles is published in the JAOA and AAO Journal, and is a contributing author in several Osteopathic textbooks.

Chelsea Simpson

For over 10 years, Chelsea’s personal and professional focus has been experiential education, a teaching and facilitation practice designed to empower people to discover their own wisdom and expertise and that of each other, and tell their stories. This focus is interwoven with commitments to social justice, art, and mindfulness. Positions have ranged from living in El Salvador for two years leading “mutual liberation” delegations between U.S. students and rural communities, to teaching English and Civics to adult undocumented immigrants at community colleges and community organizations like Make the Road NY, to teaching Montessori school art, to leading nature immersion trips for urban children at a state park.

Cheryl Hatch

Cheryl Hatch is a journalist and documentary photographer with extensive international experience. She is currently a visiting assistant professor of English at Guilford College and adviser to the award-winning student newspaper, The Guilfordian, in Greensboro, N.C. Hatch has focused her camera and reporting on war, its aftermath and its effects on soldiers, their families and those caught in the crossfire, especially women and children, working independently in Liberia, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea. In the winter of 2011-2012, she and a former student embedded with the 1/25 Stryker Brigade Combat Team 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.

Chimi Boyd-Keyes, MA

Chimi’s mission is to help people realize their highest potential by connecting to their Purpose. As a successful entrepreneur and much sought after consultant, speaker, trainer and grant writer, she is passionate about creating programs and initiatives that develop leaders and promote an equitable, inclusive environment. As a seasoned Higher Education professional for 19 years, Chimi has worked extensively on women’s and gender issues and topics relating to other marginalized populations. She has directed two university Women’s Centers, one at a historically black university (HBCU) and one at a predominantly white university (PWI). She also was at the helm of a volunteerism/social justice organization, and has led a program designed to help at-risk youth pursue higher education.

Chuck Weirich

Chuck Weirich works with NC Sea Grant to provide support to North Carolina’s developing marine aquaculture industry — encompassing the production of molluscan shellfish, crustaceans, and finfish — through outreach and technology transfer activities. He oversees and assists with research and demonstration projects designed to improve and refine production methods for the aquaculture industry. Weirich is experienced in research, education, extension, and farm management. In addition, he has held positions with universities, federal and state governmental agencies, and the commercial aquaculture industry. A native of the central Texas Hill Country, Weirich holds a bachelor’s degree from Texas A&M, a master’s degree from Texas State University (formerly Southwest Texas State University) and a doctoral degree from Clemson University.

Corey D. B. Walker, PhD

Corey D. B. Walker is Dean of the College and John W. and Anna Hodgin Hanes Professor of the Humanities at Winston-Salem State University. Prior to his appointment at Winston-Salem State University, Dean Walker served as chair of the department of Africana Studies at Brown University where he was also a tenured faculty member. Dean Walker also served as the inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge and member of the faculty in the department of Religious Studies and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. A scholar of African American social, political, and religious thought, Dean Walker has published broadly on African American thought and culture, African American religion, and religion and American public life. He has lectured before academic audiences in the United States, the Caribbean and South America, Europe, and Africa.

Kunga Denzongpa

Kunga Lhama Denzongpa graduated from Guilford College in 2014 and is currently finishing her MS degree in public health at UNC Greensboro. Kunga comes to North Carolina from Sikkim, a tiny Himalayan country that was annexed by India in 1975. She is the first of her family to leave her community for an education in the USA, and was a recipient of the Lhomon Hope Scholarship and a Bonner Scholarship at Guilford College.

Marnie Thompson

Marnie is co-Managing Director of the Fund for Democratic Communities (F4DC), where she focuses on building the capacity of social justice activists and organizations, spreading the gospel of grassroots fundraising, and building a new kind of economy based in principles of cooperation, democracy, justice, and sustainability. This year, most of her efforts are directed toward launching the Southern Reparations Loan Fund (a project of the Southern Grassroots Economies Project, of which F4DC is a founding member) and assisting in the opening of the Renaissance Community Cooperative, a community-owned grocery store that will eradicate a long-time food desert in Northeast Greensboro.

Max Carter, PhD

Max L. Carter retired from Guilford College in 2015 as the William R. Rogers Director of Friends Center and Quaker Studies. During his 25-year tenure at the College, he developed the Office of Campus Ministry, the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program, historical tours of the Guilford woods and Friends cemetery featuring Quaker civil disobedience for justice, and the summer and J-term service-learning trips to Palestine/Israel. A recorded Friends minister and Vietnam era conscientious objector, he seeks to incorporate the Quaker peace testimony into all aspects of life for human betterment. His Ph.D. dissertation at Temple University (1989) was on Quaker work with Native Americans in the Midwest.

Prakash Nair

Prakash Nair is Founding President and CEO of Fielding Nair International, a leading design firm with consultations in 45 countries on six continents. He is a futurist, a visionary planner, architect and one of the world’s leading change agents in school design. He is also the Managing Editor of DesignShare.com which attracts over two million visitors each year. Prakash is the recipient of several international awards including the prestigious CEFPI MacConnell Award, the top honor worldwide for school design He has written extensively in leading international journals about school design and educational technology and their connection to established educational research. He is also the author of several books on school planning including the landmark 2005 publication, The Language of School Design now in it’s 4th edition, and Blueprint for Tomorrow: Redesigning Schools for Student-Centered Learning published by Harvard Education Press in 2014.

Renee Minx

Renee Minx is a 23 year old UNCG graduate with a degree in Special Education. She has her teacher licensure in the state of NC. The founder of Bears Share Care, an organization whose mission is to raise awareness and send recovery booklets to survivors of abuse. She has worked in a social work setting for the last 5 years. She is currently working to get her MSW from UNC Chapel Hill.

Steve Mitchell

Steve Mitchell grew up in North Carolina with a restlessness that continues to this day. He’s been a chef, a cowboy, a construction worker, and the director of a mental health program. He’s published poetry, fiction, non-fiction and short plays. He’s directed theatre and film. His work has been published in Southeast Review, storySouth, Red Fez, and Contrary, among others. His book of short stories is The Naming of Ghosts from Press 53. He thinks of self as a verb and writing as one way to capture the self in motion. He has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt. He has two children, explorers in their own right. He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, where he lives with his partner, writer Deonna Kelli Sayed and Zip the cat.

Tedd Clevenger

Tedd Clevenger is the owner of Asheville Brewers’ Supply, which gives him a unique perspective on the craft beer movement and its ethos of ingenuity and community, from the homebrewer’s stove to a commercial brewery.

Tim Holbrook

Tim Holbrook is a simple oyster farmer who uses modern and scientifically advanced methods that are cutting edge in the aquaculture industry. While growing nearly a million oysters each year, his farm Masonboro Reserve Oyster Co. is filtering 500 million gallons of water each day. The removal of algae and nitrogen from the water is protecting the marine estuaries. His oysters are featured in some of the most highly acclaimed restaurants on the East Coast. Working closely with the Center for Marine Science at UNCW on various research projects, he is also a research grant recipient from NCSU Sea Grant for developing innovative aquaculture techniques. He is passionate about spreading the word that North Carolina is now the Napa Valley of oysters.

Tom Cannon

Raised along the Trent River in eastern North Carolina, Tom loved the water. After studying Sustainable Development and Appropriate Technology at Appalachian State, he worked for an ocean conservation non-profit in Washington, DC. Feeling a bit landlocked, Tom took a diving vacation to Thailand that turned into a seven-year adventure, in which time Tom taught school, ran a furniture company, and received his MBA from Thailand’s premier business school, Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration. Currently, Tom is in the process of getting his own oyster farm up and running in Wilmington, NC.

Yves Dusenge

Yves Dusenge is a student at Guilford College majoring in Computer Technology Information Systems and Economics. Born in a refugee camp in DR Congo during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, he comes to North Carolina from Rwanda, having lived in Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. An Honors Program student and a member of the Quaker Leadership Scholars Program, he has taken leadership positions on campus and is passionate about the future of technology, financial markets, and ethical businesses. Yves is a Quaker and the first in his family to attend college in the USA.