It’s with great pleasure that we’re announcing that TEDxPiscataquaRiver will bring the TED experience to the Seacoast for the first time. The event is scheduled for May 3, 2013 and we are currently in the process of organizing and curating this event. An advisory board was formed in February 2012 and has been meeting regularly since to craft the vision and plan for this unique event.

TEDxPiscataquaRiver will be a one-of-a-kind conference where big ideas and challenges that affect our community are openly discussed. This event will highlight an impressive lineup including speakers who are not typically heard from locally but who are doing incredibly creative, innovative, and provocative work in their fields.

Our goal is to create a memorable experience – to connect and bring diverse disciplines and backgrounds together around new ideas – in service of unleashing the thoughtful dialogue and passionate energy that is needed to promote creative thinking and community-based problem solving that will improve the quality of life on the Seacoast and beyond.

TEDxPiscataquaRiver will be a Zero Waste Event.

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 03801
United States

Errik Anderson

Errik B. Anderson is the Co-Founder and COO of Adimab LLC, a next-generation antibody discovery platform backed by Google Ventures, Borealis Ventures, Polaris Ventures, SV Life Sciences, OrbiMed Advisors. Errik is also the Co-Founder of Arsanis, Inc., an anti-infective drug development firm with operations in the United States and Vienna, Austria. More recently, Errik helped found Avitide, Inc. to advance protein purification technology in biotech. Errik currently serves as a board member of Adimab, Arsanis, Wingu, Clutch Retail and Avitide. He is an advisor to the Dartmouth Hacker Club and many startup companies. Errik received his MBA from the Tuck School of Business where he graduated as a Tuck Scholar. He studied Bioengineering at the Thayer School of Engineering and received his AB in Economics from Dartmouth College. In 2010, he was named the Young Professional of the Year by BusinessNH Magazine and won the 2010 NH High Tech Council Entrepreneur of the Year Award along with his Adimab co-founders, Tillman Gerngross and Dane Wittrup.

Rodney Brooks

Rodney Brooks is founder, CTO, and Chairman of Rethink Robotics, a 2008 Boston-based startup. The company is developing a new class of industrial robot that will help keep manufacturing jobs in America. Rethink's robots are to current industrial robots what the PC was to the mainframe. The new robots are made in the USA. Brooks was also a co-founder of iRobot (Nasdaq: IRBT) and was variously CTO, Chairman, and board member from 1990 until 2011. From 1984 to 2010 he was on the faculty at MIT as the Panasonic Professor of Robotics, and was the director of MIT CSAIL, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. While at MIT he developed the behavior-based approach to robotics that underlies the robots of both iRobot and Rethink Robotics.

Majora Carter

Majora Carter is an internationally renowned urban revitalization strategy consultant, real estate developer, and Peabody Award winning broadcaster. She is responsible for the creation & successful implementation of numerous green-infrastructure projects, policies, and job training & placement systems. After establishing several local and national organizations to carry on that work, she built on this foundation with innovative ventures and insights into urban economic developments designed to help move Americans out of poverty. Her long list of awards and honorary degrees include accolades from groups as diverse as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, Goldman Sachs, as well as a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. Her 2006 TED talk was one of the first 6 videos to launch their groundbreaking website. Majora embodies the American Dream. She has continually set new standards of excellence with projects in her South Bronx community, while expanding her reach nationally and internationally. Her philanthropic pursuits and business interests have all pointed toward greater self-esteem and economic potential for low-income people everywhere.

Eric Cesal

Eric is a designer, builder, analyst and writer. A native of Washington, D.C., Eric completed his undergraduate studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and achieved a Masters in Architecture, a Masters in Construction Management and a Masters in Business Administration from Washington University in St. Louis. Cesal began a career in humanitarian architecture as a volunteer on the Katrina reconstruction in both Biloxi and New Orleans, working to establish community design programs. From there, he has led post-disaster programs in Haiti and Japan. Somewhere along the way, Cesal wrote Down Detour Road: An Architect in Search of Practice, a novel about architecture, its place in the universe, and the importance of dental hygiene. Cesal currently manages Architecture for Humanity’s global portfolio of disaster response.

Joshua Musil Church

Growing up the son of a preacher in Maine, Joshua Musil Church wanted to one day be President of the United States and starting shortstop for the Chicago Cubs, preferably at the same time. At age 34, he has given up those childish dreams; he no longer wants to be President. Church moved out to Hollywood after attending North Park University and found a job working for Judd Apatow on his TV show Undeclared. That association led to Church's job at Mosaic Media Group, where he co-produced movies such as Step Brothers and The Other Guys, and associate produced Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Church recently wrapped production on Max Rose, a film starring the legendary Jerry Lewis. Josh is married to the love of his life, Emily Musil Church, and together they have a 5 month old daughter, Nora, who is awesome even if, in Josh’s words, "she doesn’t do much yet.”

Sister Mary Agnes Dombroski

Sister Mary Agnes Dombroski entered the convent in 1987 and spent twelve years parenting the troubled girls at St. Charles Children’s Home. During that time, she implemented a unique hiking program for the children exploring trails in New Hampshire and Maine. Sister is the Event Coordinator of the Labor Day race, which has garnered national attention and has been featured in Runner’s World magazine and the CBS Early Show as well as many other publications. She has an MBA in Entrepreneurial Business from John Paul the Great Catholic University in San Diego, California and is currently pursuing biblical studies at the graduate level.

Kaitlin Maud

Kaitlin Maud is a Digital Strategist at SapientNitro. Her role spans from brand planning and research to social listening and analysis, campaign strategy, and thought leadership in the areas of digital & millennials. She works primarily with lifestyle brands and her client roster includes LRMR (LeBron James), Bertucci's, and Sunglass Hut. Kaitlin has been published on several industry blogs and has taught workshops on branding and digital strategy at General Assembly, Microsoft, Emerson College, and via webinar with AIGA. Kaitlin holds a BFA in Communication Design from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is an accredited teacher in Massachusetts. In her independent research she explores themes such as digital property, cyberbullying, and the ethics of youth marketing and targeted advertising on social channels.

Michael Palace

Michael Palace is an environmental scientist focusing on tropical ecology, landscape ecology, and geospatial science. His research ranges from field studies of forest structure to the use of satellite imagery in an effort to predict disease, understand forest dynamics, and find and interpret past human settlement patterns. He is an Assistant Research Professor in the Earth System Research Center at the Institute of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire. He is a faculty fellow at the Sustainability Institute and coordinator for the environmental science interdisciplinary undergraduate major, both at UNH. Production of electronic music and audio field recordings is another facet of Palace's creative efforts and has recently been integrated into a collaborative research project that uses underwater microphones to understand methane release from wetlands.

Virginia Prescott

Virginia Prescott is host of Word of Mouth, NHPR’s daily conversation about emerging trends, new ideas and under-reported stories from viral and pop culture. Her deep roots in public radio began at WWOZ in New Orleans. She later launched the Edward R. Morrow Award-Winning interactive media team at WNYC in New York City, and became editor, producer and director for NPR’s On Point and PRI’s Here & Now programs while at WBUR in Boston. Throughout her radio career, she’s helped build independent radio stations throughout the developing world and trained journalists in post-conflict zones from Sierra Leone to the Balkans. She was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University and was a member of the Peabody Award-winning production team for Jazz from Lincoln Center with Ed Bradley. She loves working in radio, but regrets that so many good outfits go unnoticed.

J. Dennis Robinson

J. Dennis Robinson has published a dozen nonfiction books including histories of the Isles of Shoals, Strawbery Banke Museum, privateers in the War of 1812, and juvenile biographies of Jesse James and Lord Baltimore. A freelance columnist, he has written over 1,000 articles on the Piscataqua Region and lectures on history topics for the NH Humanities Council. A former English teacher, he owns and operates the popular culture and history Web site SeacoastNH.com. Dennis lives in Portsmouth where he is currently working on a book about the infamous 1873 Smuttynose Island murders.