TEDxCambridge is a unique evening event experience and technology exhibition that draws from the remarkable wealth of innovation, creativity, and inspiration found within Cambridge and beyond. TEDxCambridge features 1,100 guests, 50 exhibitors, and six speakers.

180 Berkeley Street
Boston, Massachusetts, 02116
United States

Adam Cohen

Electrophysiologist

Adam Cohen is a professor in the departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Physics at Harvard. He is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research focuses on understanding and controlling light-matter interactions in warm, wet, squishy environments. His lab discovered that a gene from a Dead Sea microorganism, when transferred to human neurons, converted the electrical impulses of these cells into flashes of fluorescence. Cohen has received the Blavatnik National Award in Chemistry and the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award. Cohen founded a biotech company, Q-State Biosciences, focused on combining optical imaging with stem cell technology to develop new diagnostics and therapies for neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. He has also worked on helping to develop science education in Liberia.

Andrew Lo

Financial Engineer

Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the director of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, a principal investigator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Andrew is the author of five books and over 100 research articles. His early work showed that stock market prices do not follow random walks, as many economic theories imply, but contain predictable components that can be identified and exploited to manage risk and improved expected returns. Since then, his research has spanned many other areas, including: the econometrics of hedge funds; mathematical and statistical models of systemic risk in the financial system; evolutionary models of human behavior; and, most recently, applying financial engineering to fund biomedical innovation more efficiently.

Daniel Koh

Civic Catalyst

Daniel Arrigg Koh is Chief of Staff to the City of Boston. In this capacity, he advises Mayor Martin J. Walsh on key issues and helps him execute his vision for the city and its 18,000 employees. Immediately prior, Dan served as General Manager of HuffPost Live, The Huffington Post Media Group’s streaming network, where he oversaw operations. Before HuffPost Live, he served as Chief of Staff to Chair, President, and Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington, aiding in the oversight of the 700-person international organization. Before his media career, he served as Advisor to former Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston. Dan has worked in nonprofit consulting for Booz Allen Hamilton, executive search for Spencer Stuart, Strategy and Business Development for the New England Patriots and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Labor Relations for Major League Baseball. In college, he worked for two summers as an intern for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in Boston, Massachusetts.

Julie Shah

Interactive Roboticist

Julie Shah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and leads the Interactive Robotics Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Shah received her SB and SM from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, and her PhD in Autonomous Systems from MIT. Before joining the faculty, she worked at Boeing Research and Technology on robotics applications for aerospace manufacturing. She has developed innovative methods for enabling fluid human-robot teamwork in time-critical, safety-critical domains, ranging from manufacturing to surgery to space exploration. Her group draws on expertise in artificial intelligence, human factors, and systems engineering to develop interactive robots that emulate the qualities of effective human team members to improve the efficiency of human-robot teamwork.

Mina Cikara

Social Psychologist

Mina Cikara is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Policy from Princeton University and completed a National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Professor Cikara studies how the mind, brain, and behavior change when the social context shifts from “me and you” to “us and them.” She focuses primarily on how group membership, competition, and prejudice disrupt the processes that allow people to see others as human and to empathize with others. She uses a wide range of tools – standard laboratory experiments, implicit and explicit behavioral measures, fMRI and psychophysiology – to examine failures of empathy, dehumanization, and misunderstanding between groups.

Primavera De Filippi

Techno Revolutionary

Primavera De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. She is currently a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where she’s investigating the concept of governance-by-design as it relates to distributed online architectures. Most of her research focuses on the legal challenges raised, and faced by emergent decentralized technologies – such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain-based applications – and how these technologies could be used to design new governance models capable of supporting large-scale decentralized collaboration and more participatory decision-making.