Theme: Changing Currents

In the late 1800s, what began as a lightning spark was transformed into usable electricity. During the early years, direct current was the accepted standard. Unchallenged. Until Nikola Tesla had an idea worth spreading. He harnessed changing currents and powered an entire city with light, flooding homes and lives with illumination never before experienced.

100 years ago, Austin College became a co-ed campus, opening its doors in 1918 to women and joining the world in changing currents. With catalysts as significant as these, we invite you to be open to new currents of possibility, achievement, and action. Everyday life is powered by our behaviors and attitudes. TEDxAustinCollege will be a day for ideas to connect – for sparks to fly.

TEDxAustinCollege
900 N Grand Ave
Sherman, Texas, 75090`
United States

Aly Tharp

Arts Activist

Aly Tharp is a community organizer and arts-activist who is passionate about social and ecological justice. She graduated from Austin College in 2012 and now serves as the Program Director for the Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth. Aly also volunteers much of her time to grassroots campaigns and initiatives, including as the advisory board vice-president for the Festival Beach Food Forest, an edible and medicinal landscape on public parkland in Austin, Texas.

Anissa Centers

News Anchor

Anissa Centers is a speaker and trainer who delivers insightful, engaging and inspiring messages about how to consciously create the life you really want. She’s an Emmy award-winning broadcast news anchor whose work has been seen by millions of people around the world and has worked with clients, from small startups to Fortune 500 companies, showing employees how to reach their full potential, producing noticeable results for all employees.A sharp increase in demand lead to Anissa developing a specialty in helping the ever growing population of female professionals and their organizations fully benefit from that talent.

Devin Gonier

Chief Technology Officer

Devin is Chief Technology Officer at the DGC Group, providing gamification technologies and analytics to large corporate clients. He regularly employs machine learning techniques as part of the data analytic services and developing on an online gamification platform. He graduated from Austin College in 2009 with a double major in Philosophy and Religion. After graduating, he spent six years in Tibetan areas of China working for a non-profit, teaching English at a University, and developing an English Training School. Devin is currently pursuing his Master’s Degree at Columbia in Machine Learning, and regularly studies the philosophical and technological implications of Artificial Intelligence. Devin is especially drawn to non-western (especially Buddhist) philosophical insights of the mind and how these may have relevance in the development of Artificial Intelligence.

John Williams

Chaplain, Austin College graduate

John Williams is Chaplain of Austin College in Sherman, Texas, and Co-Chair of the College’s Committee on Inclusion and Diversity. He loves music and he loves stories. He’s a folk & roll songwriter (Honorable Mention at the 2015 Woody Guthrie Songwriting Contest). He has sung “Under the Boardwalk” on stage with the Persuasions, and Maya Angelou once told him, “Young man, you have strong words.”

Randi Tanglen

Tenured English professor

Dr. Randi Lynn Tanglen is a tenured English professor and director of the Gender Studies program at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. She is the author of several scholarly articles and book chapters about American women and minority writers. Her opinion writing appears in the Dallas Morning News and the Texas Tribune’s “TribTalk.” This talk is inspired by a popular English class she teaches at Austin College called “Rise Up! Protest and Dissent in American Literature.” Dr. Tanglen grew up in Montana and loves hiking and stand-up paddleboarding.

Shelby Bagby

Austin College Student

Shelby Bagby is a natural born speaker. As valedictorian of her high school class, she addressed her fellow graduates about growing up and moving on. Shelby has strong beliefs and she stands by them. No matter what storm may shake her, she stays firm both in her determination to succeed and her belief in what is right. She has a way with words that really grabs your attention when she speaks, and a certain gist about the way she addresses people that holds that attention.