Clare Brass
Clare Brass is the head of SustainRCA, a centre for
sustainability at the Royal College of Art. Her research
focuses on how to merge sustainability and design to
generate solutions to social and environmental
challenges. At TEDxImperialCollege, she will share her
ideas with the audience in a talk entitled ”Biocentric
design: What happens when you design with nature as a
key stakeholder?”
Fotini Markopoulo
Fotini Markopoulou is a hardware tech designer and
theoretical physicist. She is cofounder of doppel, a
wearable tech company that uses cuttingedge research in
psychophysiology, the study of how the mind and body
affect oneanother, to create technology that changes how
we perceive, feel, and behave. Prior to doppel, Fotini was
a founding member and faculty at the Perimeter Institute
for Theoretical Physics in Canada, one of the premier
institutes on the frontiers of theoretical physics.
Geoffrey Baldwin
Dr. Geoff Baldwin is a Reader in Biochemistry in the Department of
Life Sciences and Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation
(CSynBI) at Imperial College London. He has spent his career at the
interface of the physical and life sciences. He has been one of the
advisors of the very successful Imperial College iGEM teams over
the last few years. He has also been responsible for developing the
training pipeline of synthetic biologists at Imperial College, having
established the final year undergraduate module that is taught across
the Life Science and Bioengineering Departments, and being Director
of the MRes in Systems and Synthetic biology. He has been involved
with setting up the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation where
he has an active programme of research in DNA assembly, part
characterisation, circuit design and implementation.He also has an
active programme of research and commercialisation around the use
of protein nanocages as drug delivery vectors.
John Pendry
Prof. Sir John Pendry is a professor of theoretical solid
state physics at Imperial College London and is one of
the pioneers in the field of metamaterials. These are
engineered materials with properties not found
anywhere in nature. He is most well known for his work
on the “cloak of invisibility.” He has been awarded
numerous awards such as the Newton medal for his
research and in his talk, Prof. Pendry will tell us about
the science of invisibility.
Nathalie Pettorelli
Dr. Nathalie Pettorelli is a research fellow at the
Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London,
where she carries out research on assessing and
predicting the impacts of global environmental
change on biodiversity and ecosystem services. In
her talk, Nathalie will provide her perspectives on
how to facilitate better interactions and
communication between scientists and the public,
specifically drawing on her experience organising
and managing the Soapbox Science initiative.
Robin Hanson
Robin Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason
University, and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute
of Oxford University. He has a doctorate in social science from
CALTECH, a master’s degree in physics and philosophy from the
University of Chicago, and nine years experience as a research
programmer, at Lockheed and NASA. Lately Prof. Hanson has
studied the social implications of humanlevel artificial intelligence in
the form of brain emulations, or “ems,” probably feasible within
roughly a century. Ems change everything, including mind speeds,
body sizes, security, management, job training, career paths, wages,
identity, retirement, life cycles, reproduction, mating, conversation,
wealth inequality, city sizes, growth rates, politics, governance, law,
and war. See his new book for more: http://ageofem.com.