TEDxBYU aims to spark thought and dialogue among audience members around innovations that provide greater social value and the never changing fact that this innovation often happens at the intersections. Presenters share their experiences, insights, and methods for creating social change in an ever changing and fast paced world. Featured speakers are world-renowned innovators, BYU students, faculty and alumni.

Covey Center for the Arts
425 West Center Street
Provo, Utah, 84601
United States

Casey Cangelosi

Percussionist and composer, Casey Cangelosi, serves as the Director of Percussion at James Madison University. He is commonly hosted by universities around the U.S. as a visiting guest artist, and has been a worldwide featured soloist at events including The Midwest Clinic, PASIC, The Piteå Percussion Repertoire Festival in Sweden, The International Percussion Festival of Taiwan, and The Italy PAS International Competition, among others. Casey is regularly commissioned for new compositions and from the percussion community has been called the "Paganini of Percussion" and "The voice of a new generation". 

J. Christian Jensen

J. Christian Jensen is a part-time educator and a full-time documentary filmmaker. He has spent his career immersed in the study and craft of filmmaking – devoting particular attention to the ways that personal tensions can be used to create powerful, authentic stories. Jensen believes that storytelling can be an incredible force to bridge gaps between opposing beliefs and ideas, and as such he uses filmmaking to explore tensions between things like political ideology, science, religion, modernization, and traditional values. Jensen’s recent film, White Earth (2014), is a true tale of a North American oil boom seen through unexpected eyes. Three children and an immigrant mother brave a cruel winter and explore themes of innocence, home and the American Dream. 

Jane Leu

As the founder of Smarter Good, Upwardly Global, and a contributor to four other social sector start-ups, Jane Leu is intrigued by problems and their solutions. Jane Leu’s entrepreneurial work in the social sector centers on optimizing the talents of people and systems to help them reach their potential. As the founder and executive director for the first decade of Upwardly Global, she focused on integrating skilled immigrant professionals into the workforce, turning the brain drain into brain gain for the U.S. As the founder and CEO of Smarter Good, she is leveraging the talents of global professionals in their home countries to improve the efficiency of the fast-growing global nonprofit sector.

Jani Radebaugh

Jani Radebaugh is a planetary explorer in search of landscapes on Earth that are analogues to distant locations across the solar system. She has explored mega sand dunes, lava lakes and caves, wind-carved ridges, impact craters, and has picked up meteorites in Antarctica. She teaches geological sciences at Brigham Young University and frequently brings students along on her adventures.

Lehla Kisor

Lehla Kisor recently graduated from Brigham Young University and works at Google as an Account Strategist. She has overcome a few struggles in her own life to be able to do really cool things, and has helped others do the same through missionary and humanitarian service. Problem solving, people watching,  and finding new ways to look at the world are a few of her favorite things. She is anxious to continue sharing her perspective and (hopefully) change the world.

Matt Taylor

Matt Taylor is on a journey to make the social sector better at its job of helping those who need it and solving social ills. It's bound to be a long journey (which is why you'll rarely catch him in anything but sneakers), but he's already seen incredible progress over the last ten years while working with some of the sector's leading organizations. He currently leads strategy and operations at IDEO.org, where he is unleashing the sector's capacity to innovate through human-centered design. Other stops along the way have included New Profit, AmeriCorps, Nonprofit Finance Fund, Global Giving, United Way Worldwide, Focus: HOPE, and Big Brothers Big Sisters, which allowed him to simultaneously explore and advance new approaches and paradigms of problem solving—like social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy, nonprofit financing, and philanthropic marketplaces—while understanding the roots of social service in this country.

Nicholas Fusso

Nicholas Fusso is funding an army of poverty-fighting entrepreneurs. He manages D-Prize, a competition that challenges entrepreneurs to increase access to proven poverty interventions. He has helped launch 25 new organizations that have enabled nearly 100,000 people to gain access to health, energy, and education solutions around the world. 

Sterling Anderson

Sterling has spent the better part of the last decade questioning the "how" of autonomous vehicle development. He spent much of this time at MIT, where his work in shared autonomy generated nearly $2M in research funding, four patents, several academic publications and hundreds of print and online articles worldwide. He has since launched two companies, advised several others as a management consultant with McKinsey and Company and currently leads the Model X program at Tesla Motors.