Theme: Breaking Boundaries

Every day there are new boundaries to be broken as discoveries are made in science, medicine, and engineering and new people push for radical change in their societies across the world. From the child that learns to walk, the scientists that discovers a new planet with potential life, the chef that creates new flavours in food, and the doctor that finds another workaround to save a life. We are surrounded every day by boundaries and as humans are uniquely placed to act as conduits to break them. We push harder and farther until the limits of our imagination are not constrained by the physical world and become established reality.

At the event we will be exploring our theme of Breaking Boundaries in three sessions that form a sort of story, a formula or even potential steps that could serve as a guide to breaking boundaries. We will begin by Challenging Assumptions. Breaking away from what is established, a crucial step in instilling humility and accepting that we are not at the peak of our civilisation but much remains to be discovered. We will then explore New Perspectives that are born from the imagination of those who are beginning on this journey and have provided new insights and innovations that hold a lot of potential to ultimately Change the World. In this last session we will hear from those that have broken boundaries and pushed the limits sometimes literally out of this planet.

Goodenough College
London House, Goodenough College
Mecklenburgh Square
London, London, City of, WC1N 2AB
United Kingdom

Adrian Paul Rabe

Adrian “Doc Aids” Rabe is a physician from the Philippines specialising in General Internal Medicine. He is also a researcher and an educator, and was appointed the youngest Clinical Associate Professor of the University of the Philippines from 2011 to 2014. Now, Adrian is pursuing his MSc in Health Policy, Planning and Financing, a programme jointly hosted by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He is also completing his master’s degree in Health Professions Education at the University of the Philippines. At LSHTM, Adrian sits as President of the Student Representative Council.

Antony Declercq

Antony is a digital governance researcher who focuses on making the notion of “global digital citizenship” real. As a researcher of “open government” and civic engagement through technology, Antony worked at the Governance Lab at New York University to bring open government practices to ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization that manages the Domain Name System (DNS). Antony then worked to increase collaboration in the larger world of Internet governance through the NETmundial Solutions Map, a “map” of who-does-what-and-where for Internet governance and its many associated issues. Antony’s most recent work focused on jurisdictional issues online that involve extraterritorial legal disputes across national borders. Antony is currently pursuing a Master of Public Administration with a focus on digital governance and policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Joseph Wang

Joseph is 10 years old, and was born in Xián City, China. He moved to London with his parents in August 2015, where he learnt to speak English. He lives in Goodenough College with his mum, and attends Argyle Primary School. Joseph learnt to play the piano for four years in China and started to learn violin in Argyle Primary School. Joseph is a member of the Saturday Band in the Camden Junior Academy of Music. Joseph loves Lego, board games, gardening, and making new friends.

Kate Glazebrook

Kate is a Principal Advisor (Head of Growth and Equality) with the Behavioural Insights Team and leads on BIT’s first technology platform, Applied. Kate’s work focuses on using behavioural science to improve productivity, combat inequality, and promote wellbeing. Kate has previously worked with the BIT on financial behaviour and international development. Kate joined BIT after finishing a Masters in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (Frank Knox Scholar), where she specialised in behavioural economics and analytical methods. She has previously worked on education policy for UNESCO in Thailand and Myanmar, and spent a number of years in the Australian Treasury working on schools policy, and tax & pension reform. Kate also holds a Bachelor in Economic and Social Sciences (First Class Honours) from the University of Sydney.

Max Harris

Max Harris is a writer based in Oxford and is currently an Examination Fellow at All Souls College in Oxford. He worked on prison issues in New Zealand and then helped to set up 'JustSpeak', a criminal justice advocacy organisation centred on young people, which he co-chaired from 2011-2012. He has also been involved with a range of campaigning and activist work, including in criminal justice, climate change, and anti-racism movements. Since moving to the UK in 2012, he has continued to write and speak on mass incarceration, and in April helped to organise a conference in Oxford, on the subject 'Beyond the Prison'. Max received his LLB with honors at the University of Auckland and subsequently clerked for the Chief Justice of New Zealand. 

Natalie Ohana

Natalie is a socio-legal scholar, currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Laws in UCL. Prior to moving to London for her PhD studies, Natalie was the Head of Legal Department of the refuge for women fleeing domestic violence in Jerusalem, Israel. Natalie’s recently completed PhD entitled ‘Social Exclusion through Legal Naming Events’ looked at the manners by which legal discourse operates to exclude social realities and voices. Alongside her PhD Natalie designed and conducted a project aimed at revealing how people who went through legal proceedings experience the legal system, for which she was awarded UCL 2015 Provost’s Award for Public Engagement. She is currently researching the potential embedded in art for the understanding of the relationship between law and society. Natalie is living in Goodenough College and is a mother of two boys, Adi and Erran.

Richard Vincent

Richard is the co-founder of Fundamental VR (www.fundamentalvr.com), a consultancy and creative agency helping brands and businesses to harness the opportunities of virtual, mixed, and augmented reality. Prior to Fundamental, Richard was the CEO of Smartusion - a live/digital agency which he also co-founded, overseeing its growth and eventual sale to Omnicom Group. Richard’s career in marketing and communications has taken him across the globe including working in the US for a number of years as well as Russia and Asia. He is married with two children and two (slightly oversized) dogs!

Stefan Behling

Stefan is a Senior Executive Partner at Foster + Partners and head of Studio 4. He leads the practice’s research into sustainable design and the use of new materials and methods in construction, and established the Material Research Centre (MRC). He is also responsible for the Specialist Modelling Group (SMG), a multi-disciplinary research team who are experts in all aspects of environmental analysis, computational design, architecture for the senses, and digital fabrication. He has worked on a number of projects that have pioneered new techniques for energy efficiency and resource management, including the Reichstag, New German Parliament in Berlin, the McLaren Technology Centre, London City Hall, the carbon-neutral settlement, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, and his team is working on lunar and Mars projects. Currently he is involved in Apple’s new Headquarters in California. Stefan has held the chair for integrated design at the University Stuttgart, Germany, for 20 years.

Tamara Alireza

Tamara is half Saudi and half Mexican, born in London and raised in Los Angeles. She has many interests, from travel and cooking at Le Cordon Bleu to singing at weddings. With a double masters of neuroscience from UCL and Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris, she is currently finishing her neuroscience PhD at Imperial College London, conducting Parkinson’s disease research. Tamara discovered 9 years ago she had aphantasia and has keenly pursued the topic ever since. With the help of the TEDx platform and its audience, she wishes to spread the word about aphantasia, as it is such a new subject that most people are completely unaware of, in order to determine more about how many people have it and whether any correlations may be drawn between them.

Tony Koutsoumbos

Tony Koutsoumbos is the founder of Debating London, a debate club for adults, and the Debating Foundation, an education charity for young people and marginalised communities. In 2013, Tony led a team of debate trainers to Rwanda to help a new advocacy charity host their first ever debate camp, bringing together teenagers from dozens of schools across the country’s capital, Kigali. This in turn has exposed him to a very different perspective on the boundaries of free speech, in a country still escaping the shadow of the 1994 genocide; a lesson that could prove instructive and helpful in resolving heated debates here in the UK on their boundaries on university campuses. Such was its success, he and his team returned the following year to an even larger camp with students attending from as far afield as Kenya. In 2015, the students became the teachers and designed their own programme, boldly titled ‘The Dreamers Academy’.