In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized (subject to certain rules and regulations).

Loeb Playhouse
128 Memorial Mall
West Lafayette, Indiana, 47907
United States

Austin Deardorff

Austin Deardorff, Co-founder of Aerial Agriculture, graduated from Libertyville High School in the northern suburbs of Chicago. He came to Purdue in 2012 to complete his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and is expecting to graduate in Spring 2017. He has previously worked for Zimmer Biomet, a company which manufactures biomedical devices such as knee and hip replacements, before starting his own company. In May 2015, Austin co-founded Aerial Agriculture LLC to revolutionize the agriculture industry by building drones in-house to capture specialized multispectral images of the entire crop fields. This technology helps reduce farming-related costs while increases agricultural production.

Dev Niyogi

Dr. Dev Niyogi is a professor at Purdue University with joint appointments in the Department of Agronomy, Crops, Soils, and Environmental Sciences and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. He is also designated as a University Faculty Scholar and the State Climatologist for Indiana. He has published over 150 peer reviewed journal papers, over 13 book chapters, and his work has been cited over 5000 times with various media citations in popular press such as Yahoo!, MSNBC, Wired, CNN, Live Science, and NASA press releases.

Eckhard Groll

Dr. Eckhard A. Groll is the Reilly Professor of Mechanical Engineering and also serves as the Director of the Office of Professional Practice at Purdue. He is also the Regional Editor for the Americas for the International Journal of Refrigeration. Professor Groll has been recognized for his academic leadership in higher education and has received numerous awards for his research and teaching excellence, e.g. E. K. Campbell Award from ASHRAE, his induction into Purdue’s Book of Great, and Faculty Scholar Award. Professor Groll received Charles B. Murphy Teaching Award in 2005, it is the University’s highest undergraduate teaching honor.

Everett Berry

Everett Berry is a Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Perceive Inc., as well as Principle Investigator on Perceive's Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation. He has co-authored four papers in the area of multimedia systems, focusing on the design of systems for large-scale, distributed video analysis. Previously, Everett has worked at Qualcomm, Hewlett Packard, and as a research assistant at Purdue University. He received a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Engineering from Purdue in May 2016.

Karthik Kannan

Having won the Best Paper Awards in the 10th and the 15th Annual Workshop on Information Technology and Systems, Karthik Kannan is now a Professor at Purdue. His proposal of the concept of "Design for Instincts" discusses a way to organize businesses in the current age and he specifically studies how different aspects of information technology may be used to exploit human instincts and biases in order to nudge/manipulate behavior. His papers have been accepted in numerous leading conferences and journals in the information systems area, including Management Science, Information Systems Research, Workshop on Information Technology and Systems, Workshop on Information Systems Economics, International Conference on Information Systems, and Conference on Information System and Technology.

Kewa Mei

Kewa (Jeffery) Mei is a first year MBA student in the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University. He thinks of himself as a “geek in business” and thus has chosen his specialization in Management Information System. One of his team projects, a text mining and sentiment analysis project, has won the Teradata Business Analytics Competition in 2015. He often thinks out of the box to solve problems.

Kyle McNulty

Kyle McNulty is a Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Perceive Inc., a Purdue-based startup that helps retailers measure and understand more about their in-store shoppers. Kyle holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and has co-authored three papers in the areas of multimedia systems, focusing on applications for large-scale, distributed video analysis. Previously, Kyle has worked at Garmin and as a research assistant at Purdue University. Outside of academia, McNulty has spent four years working with a Purdue team on the development of a Kindle-like device for people who are blind.

Miley Song

Miley graduated from Purdue University in 2014 with a master's degree in Hospitality and Tourism Management. Even though both Miley and her husband, Shawn, are originally from China, they met in the U.S. as graduate students. She speaks about how living in America influenced the way she approached her relationship and how she planned her wedding, which caused misunderstandings and disagreements with her parents.

Patrick Mosher

Patrick Mosher is the Managing Director at Accenture. Patrick has had many roles over his 26 year career and currently is Accenture’s Chief Scientist for Sales Transformation. He has significant cross-industry experience with deep specialty in facilitating large scale change in large organizations. He delivers value to his clients by transforming sales, marketing and service workforces; designing, developing, and deploying innovative organization strategies; reengineering processes; and gaining and sustaining executive sponsorship for large scale initiatives. Patrick launched his career out of Purdue after earning 3 degrees from 3 different Purdue schools. He graduated with a Chemical Engineering degree in 1983. After engineering, he graduated with an MA in Organization Communication from the College of Liberal Arts and finally, he graduated with an MS HR from the Krannert School of Business.

Sherine Abdelmawla

Dr. Sherine Abdelmawla is the Co-founder and CEO of Akanocure Pharmaceuticals. She was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. After earning her Bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Cairo University, she left to the United States where she pursued a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Purdue University. For the past 10 years, Sherine has been working on cancer research hoping that one day she can make a difference in the lives of cancer patients.

Vilas Pol

Prof. Vilas G. Pol is an Associate Professor at Purdue University’s School of Chemical Engineering. Prior to Purdue, Prof. Pol worked as a Material Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory focusing on improving electrode materials and designing their surface architecture for superior, long lasting rechargeable batteries. He now leads a research team dedicated to advancing the current state of commercial energy storage technology. One of his key research projects focuses on upcycling plastic bags and packing peanuts into carbon spheres and carbon nanotubes as anode electrode materials for lithium-ion batteries. Prof. Pol’s extensive scientific breakthroughs have been featured in many media outlets including New Scientist, Discovery, Popular Science, Smithsonian, USA Today, Forbes, ABC7 news, and Asia TV. In 2015, Prof. Pol and team were recognized by the R&D 100 Awards (Oscars of Invention) for their work on ‘Versatile Hard Carbon Microspheres Made from Plastic Waste’.