Theme: DRIVE (Y)OUR REALITY

Penn State University event in it's 6th year. Organizing team are all students.

Schwab Auditorium
E Pollock Rd & Pattee Mall
University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802
United States

Damjan Stankovic

Damjan is an interaction and interface designer that over time fell in love with prototyping and inventing new products. He is currently working as an industrial designer in Palo Alto. His latest project is Rhei (hellorhei.com) – the electro­mechanical prototype of a liquid clock that uses magnets and ferrofluid to tell time. Before that he had an opportunity to work for several amazing startups and influence the design and architecture of various apps and services, experimenting with different technologies. His work has been published by media like Discovery, Wired, Guardian, Fastcodesign, BBC... Damjan has won 5 Red dot awards so far.

Dana Kletchka

Dana Carlisle Kletchka fell in love with art museums at an early age and spent her professional life creating opportunities for others to fall in love with them, too. She facilitates educational and interpretive programming at the Palmer Museum of Art and works with faculty, staff, students, educators, and community members to create opportunities for engaging with and learning about permanent collections, special exhibitions, and each other. Her work in the arts calls her to promote justice and equity and to envision a more compassionate world.

Erik Gomez

My work has allowed me to become more of a global citizen and to expand my knowledge of world cultures. I am currently the Program Manager and I oversee all of our communication with students and professors—over 7,000 students per year. As part of the Center and as one of the coordinators of the Soc 119 course, I have also traveled to Haiti to volunteer my time in community development and I was interviewed by MTV last year as one of their “Game Changers,” which they define as young professionals doing work for the greater good of the community. I am currently applying to graduate school with the intention of starting next fall and to be able to continue to pursue my passion for humanity, education, and higher learning.

Jens Grossklags

Jens Grossklags is an Assistant Professor and holds the endowed Haile Family Early Career Assistant Professorship at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. Previously, he served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Information Technology Policy, and as a Lecturer of Computer Science at Princeton University. In 2009, he completed his doctoral dissertation at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. While at UC Berkeley, he also obtained master’s degrees in Computer Science, and Information Management and Systems. He also held visiting positions at Eurecom (France), Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland). Specifically, Jens is motivated to contribute to a better understanding of the current and future marketplace for personal and corporate information, and improved designs of the underlying evolving security infrastructure.

Joshua Mitro Lavra

Josh Lavra works in San Francisco as a product manager, design thinker, and maker. Since graduating from the Penn State College of Engineering in 2011, Josh has explored a number or roles and challenges across the US. Most recently, he developed and launched a self-service vending machine for industrial products in partnership with the world’s largest home improvement retailer. This experiment in intrapreneurship has led him to explore the question: is it possible to innovate within a large organization? (short answer: it depends.)

Julia Galef

Julia Galef co-founded the Center for Applied Rationality, a non-profit devoted to developing cognitive science-based strategies for reasoning and decision making. In addition to research, they run workshops for companies and talented individuals who want to use rationality to help them address global problems. Julia’s background is originally in statistics, and she did social science research at Columbia and Harvard Business Schools for several years before becoming a writer for venues such as Slate, Science, Scientific American, and more. For the last six years, Julia has hosted the Rationally Speaking podcast.

Keith Edwards

Keith Edwards is a social justice educator, sexual violence prevention speaker, men’s identity scholar, and leadership coach.  He has spoken and consulted at more than 100 colleges and universities, presented more than 100 programs at national conferences, and written more than 15 articles or book chapters on these issues.  He is an affiliate faculty member in the Leadership in Student Affairs program at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN, where he teaches graduate courses on diversity and social justice in higher education.  He spends each day trying to be a great father who made the world better through those he touched and influenced.

Khanjan Mehta

Khanjan Mehta is the Founding Director of the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) Program and Assistant Professor of Engineering Design at Penn State. HESE is an integrated learning, research, and entrepreneurial engagement program focused on developing and commercializing technology-based solutions in low-resource settings. Mehta has led technology-based social ventures in Kenya, Tanzania, India, Sierra Leone, Mozambique and other countries. The HESE program was the recipient of the 2013 W.K. Kellogg Foundation Engagement Award (Northeast Region) from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), 2011 Outstanding Specialty Entrepreneurship Program Award from the US Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) and was named by Popular Mechanics as one of thirty “Awesome College Labs” across America.

Michael D. Burroughs

Michael D. Burroughs is a philosopher, ethicist, educator (and beekeeper). Michael earned his PhD. in Philosophy from the University of Memphis and currently serves as Associate Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Penn State. Michael has published widely on topics in ethics, the philosophy of education, and childhood. In addition, he has devoted much of his professional career to practicing philosophy and ethics with populations beyond the university, including children in K-12 schools, prison inmates, and senior citizens. Michael's forthcoming book (co-authored with Jana Mohr Lone) is entitled Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) and addresses the purpose, theory, and practice of teaching philosophy and ethics in K-12 schools. In addition to his professional pursuits, Michael enjoys spending time in the out-of-doors, playing music, and traveling, among other things.

Miguel Mostafá

Miguel Mostafa is an Associate Professor of Physics, and Astronomy and Astro- physics at Penn State University. After obtaining his Ph.D. in high energy particle physics (measuring W bosons with the DØ detector at Fermilab) from Instituto Bal- seiro in Argentina, he was a fellow of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy, and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of New Mexico. He was a faculty member at the University of Utah, and then Colorado State before joining Penn State in 2013. He has been working on ultra-high energy cosmic rays as a member of the Pierre Auger Collaboration since 2001, and on very-high energy gamma rays as a member of the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Collaboration since 2009.

Nipun Mehta

Nipun Mehta is the founder of ServiceSpace, an incubator of projects that works at the intersection of volunteerism, technology and gift-economy. What started as an experiment with friends is now a global ecosystem of over 400,000 members who have delivered millions of dollars in service for free. Their projects include DailyGood, KarmaTube, KindSpring and KarmaKitchen -- and has garnered Dalai Lama's Unsung Hero of Compassion award and more recently, President Obama's appointment on a council to address poverty and inequality.  Nipun is routinely invited to share his message of "giftivism" to wide ranging audiences, from inner city youth in Memphis to academics in London to international dignitaries at the United Nations; his speech at UPenn commencement in May 2012 was read by millions. He serves on the advisory boards of the Seva Foundation, the Dalai Lama Foundation, and Greater Good Science Center.

Patrick Cines

Patrick Cines is a Marketing major in the Smeal College of Business at Penn State University. He started a petition in his college called “Stand Up to Altria”, which calls on his business school to drop Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris USA and largest manufacturer of tobacco products, as a corporate partner. Patrick highlights the importance of identity, personal values, and asks his fellow students to think about who they are and what they stand for.

Pawel Nolbert

"Pawel Nolbert was born in 1984 in Poland and despite not growing in a very creative environment, he’d always been drawn to various creative fields, from the early years of his life. He started playing with digital graphics in his teenage years and started his career as a self-taught digital artist. He studied Information Technology at Jan Dlugosz Academy in Poland and dropped out on his final year, to focus on personal and commercial work as a graphic designer, illustrator and artist. Since then he has been working on a variety of image-making fields for big and independent international clients, as well as on private experimental art and design projects - to keep constantly reinventing his work and to inspire a more original approach to commercial projects. He currently lives and works in Warsaw."

Richard Alley

Dr. Richard Alley has ranged from Antarctica to Greenland to help learn the history of Earth’s climate, and whether the great ice sheets will fall in the ocean and flood our coasts.  With over 250 scientific publications, he has been asked to provide advice to the highest levels of government, and been recognized with numerous awards including election to the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society.  He hosted the recent PBS miniseries Earth: The Operators’ Manual, and has been compared to a cross between Woody Allen and Carl Sagan for his enthusiastic efforts to communicate the excitement and importance of the science to everyone.

Sajay Samuel

Sajay Samuel has taught Management Accounting and related subjects to undergraduates, MBA's and Executives over assignments that included stints at Bucknell University and the University of Connecticut. His research published in scholarly journals aims at clarifying some of the foundational assumptions of management thought and practice. Parallel to these researches on management and accounting he also studies political philosophy and history. He has presented the early fruits of this work in France, Italy, Germany and England. Professor Samuel is working on the political significance of administrative agencies (e.g, SEC) and professional associations (e.g, Accounting Profession) in liberal democratic polities.

Scott Woods

Fifteen years ago Scott Woods and his wife, Ieva, quit their jobs, canceled their lease, and sold almost all of their belongings. It was a difficult and unlikely decision; by all measures they had great jobs, great friends, and a great place to live. But there are some experiences that can’t be achieved with a 9to5 job. They spent the next several years traveling around the world, rock climbing and running ultramarathons full time. Their many adventures included climbing towers in the desert, remote walls in South Africa, alpine peaks in Peru, and running 100mile trail races. They spent many seasons in Yosemite Valley, making trips up Half Dome, El Capitan, and other big granite walls.

Tisha Leslie

I was born with more curiosity than I knew how to handle.  Asking provocative questions got this otherwise “good girl” kicked out of class more than once.  At age 25 my manager told me I had “chutzpah”.  At the time I didn’t know the meaning but loved the sound of it.  Audacity. Guts. Nerve. Boldness.