Theme: Active Minds Changing Lives

TEDxWWU is an independently organized TED event that took place on the campus of Western Washington University on April 11th, 2015. The event was themed "Active Minds, Changing Lives", and included cutting edge talks on science, human rights and more from WWU faculty and beyond.

516 High Street
Bellingham, Washington, 98225
United States

Art Sherwood

Art Sherwood is the David Cole Professor of Entrepreneurship in the College of Business and Economics at Western Washington University. Dr. Sherwood is the director of Western’s IDEA Institute (InterDisciplinary Entrepreneurship in Action), an Affiliated Faculty of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis and co-founder of the Cooperative Business Research Institute. Having completed his graduate work at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business with a research focus on cooperative alliances, he now seeks to better understand co-operative entrepreneurship, governance and leadership. In addition to his academic work, he is an experienced entrepreneur and a member-owner of CDS Consulting Co-op through which he advises and teaches co-operative leaders throughout the United States.

Bobby Davis

Bobby Davis is an artist by nature. Studying Industrial Design at Western Washington University allows him the opportunity to realize his art in every medium, especially those allowing consumers and mankind to benefit from his creativity. Being from Federal Way the western side of Washington has been home his whole life. Among pushing the field of fashion and transportation design Bobby hopes to expand every occupation through design thinking. With hopes of developing his own creative firm after graduation Bobby thanks roles models such a Jonathan Ive, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Kanye West for expanding the meaning of design beyond traditional concepts.

Charis Weathers

Having lived in thirteen different states or countries, Charis happily settled long-term in Bellingham in 2012. Her exposure to so many places and cultures has given Charis a unique perspective on the shared human experience. Wanting to explore new ways of being and doing church, Charis is believed to be the first female solo church-planter in Whatcom County, having started the vibrant community of Echoes. Her adventurous spirit often compels Charis to get outdoors; she’s done self-guided adventure travel on five continents, and in many, many fascinating, beautiful places in the North American West. Having survived challenging circumstances as an adolescent, having faced a wide variety of fears in her lifetime, and having journeyed with many people through complex emotions and life experiences, Charis is eager to help others process through their own understanding of fear.

Craig Dunn

My personal purpose is to resolve social injustice(s); this drives virtually all my thinking, doing, and being. I have spent twenty-five years in University praxis imagining the ways in which business knowledge, skills and abilities might be applied to this purpose. But not just imagining. Convinced that free-market capitalism is on the cusp of an evolutionary disruption, I have worked assiduously to equip college students to take all that they know about traditional business practice…and imagine how such practice can be applied to creating sustainable, market-based revenue streams in support of, well, making the world a more equitable place. And not inconsequentially, in the process to hold forth to students a vision of meaningfulness in their own lives, as they engage with truly redemptive work. Craig P. Dunn is Dean within the College of Business and Economics at Western Washington University.

Dana Hasert

Dana is an undergraduate sophomore studying Community Health. She is passionate about people, personal challenge, and health. More specifically, she is interested in sexual and reproductive health (STI’s, contraception, conception, and relationships). Eventually she’d like to teach health/ sex ed to high schoolers, and maybe go to grad school for Public Health. She is a current member of the WWU women’s club volleyball team and Fairhaven Free Press newspaper, and is dabbling at mountain biking, and learning how to fly fish.

Joseph Trimble

Joseph E. Trimble, PhD, is a Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Psychology at Western Washington University and a President’s Professor at the Center for Alaska Native Health Research at the University of Alaska. From 2000-2001, he was a Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. For the past forty years he has served on over 15 different scientific review panels for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He has over 140 publications on multicultural topics in psychology including 20 books. He has received close to 20 regional, national and international awards for excellence in teaching and research in the field of multicultural psychology.

Julie Salmon Kelleher

Julie Salmon Kelleher was born in Seattle and attended Reed College and the University of Chicago, where she wrote a dissertation on 19th-century utopian narratives. As a critical and creative writer, she asks not only how we make our literature, but how it makes us: how the forms we write in shape our understanding of ourselves and our world, and how we in turn contribute to that understanding when we write. Her critical work explores the ways genre and culture interact, evaluating what different media (oral, written, visual, audiovisual, digital) are capable of saying, and what their social contexts permit them to say. Her creative work straddles classic and emergent forms. She is a novelist whose books are represented by Dunham Literary Agency, she blogs on writing and media at underrevision.com, and she is currently working with a class of Fairhaven College students to create a fictional video blog serial.

Kevin Dixey

: I've managed to do enough stupid things to make my life interesting but not enough to feel like I'm done yet. I’ve spent most of my time working with technology as a designer, photographer, developer and finally a creative director. I’ve spent the past decade as an educator/instructional technologist focusing on creating learning environments that allow people the greatest opportunity to succeed. I believe education is the single greatest tool for improving any system, and will return dividends far in excess of the cost. There is nothing better than the look in a student's eyes when they suddenly understand something that was baffling moments before. Despite my love of technology I believe the pivotal moment in human history was when our earliest ancestors stood up in the tall grass and understood that they were stronger together than apart.

Logan Brouelette

Logan Brouelette graduated from Western Washington University in fall of 2014 with an English degree in creative writing. Brouelette has been heavily involved on campus while working on their undergraduate degree, working in offices like the Resource and Outreach Program's Women's Center, Residence Life, New Student Services and Family Outreach, Extended Education, and the Equal Opportunities Office while also committing two years to the nationally renowned women's rowing team. Brouelette will be starting graduate school at Lewis and Clark in Higher Education Administration this coming fall in pursuit of creating gender equity in higher education. Brouelette dedicates their time to advocating for transgender identities and participating in athletic endeavors like distance running and road cycling.

Margi Fox

Margi Fox teaches at Western Washington University, does professional writing and editing, and composes nonfiction. As a Senior Instructor of English, she specializes in technical and professional writing. She’s also taught a range of writing classes for organizations such as Whatcom Educational Credit Union and Whatcom Community College. Currently, Margi is working on a series of articles about local nonprofits. The profiles appear in Prime Time and Whatcom Magazine, publications of The Bellingham Herald. Other work includes creative nonfiction. Her essay, “God of Books” won a Literal Latte Award. Margi inherited the subject of wills from her family. In healing from difficult wills and celebrating the positive ones, she’s developed her main ideas about these final documents. She has researched the topic extensively and written The Afterlife of Wills, a book about the emotional and spiritual dimensions of final bequests (yet to be published).

Melissa Rice

Dr. Melissa Rice is an Assistant Professor of Planetary Science at Western Washington University, where she teaches in the Geology Department and the Physics & Astronomy Department. Her research focuses on the sedimentology, stratigraphy and mineralogy of planetary surfaces; the current aim of her work is to help constrain the habitability of ancient environments on Mars. She is a collaborator on the active NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity and Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity missions. Dr. Rice received her Ph.D. in the Department of Astronomy at Cornell University. She was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology.

Michael Medler

Dr. Michael J. Medler received a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Arizona in 1997. He has served as chair of the Department of Environmental Studies at Western Washington University and as President of the Association for Fire Ecology. He was also the founding editor of the Journal Fire Ecology, and he has testified about wildfires and climate before the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Currently he is teaching at Huxley College of the Environment. He is also the director of the WWU Spatial Institute. Before graduate school, Dr. Medler worked for a variety of federal agencies on trial-crews and fire-crews as well as working as a ranger. These experiences shaped his interest in using spatial technology to help map and understand both the physical and cultural issues surrounding wildfire as well as other natural processes.