Theme: Two Visions

Cat and dog, coffee and tea, and black and white. What are the two dichotomies in your life and why are they so important to you? What's the in-between and why do we forget about the grey area sometimes?

Stuyvesant High School
345 Chambers Street
New York City, New York, 10282
United States

Deepti Kapur

Deepti Sharma Kapur is the CEO and Founder of FoodtoEat, an online marketplace where local businesses can order team meals from the best local restaurants, food trucks and caterers. Her goal is to help businesses feed employees great food and build stronger work cultures, while also helping local mom & pop food vendors use technology to build sustainable catering businesses. For this work, she was honored in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2013. Deepti is extremely active in her community and serves as a board member for both The Business Center for New Americans and The Learning About Multimedia Project, non-profit organizations that work with immigrant business owners and children, respectively. Most recently, she cofounded the Mountaintop Program, an initiative that brings innovators and entrepreneurs into New York City schools to mentor and inspire K-12 students. Ultimately, one of Deepti's core principles concerns "paying it forward," or passing on her knowledge to others. She fulfills this passion as part of Mayor De Blasio's WE NYC initiative, where she mentors advises other female entrepreneurs on starting their own businesses. Finally, she was also recently named as a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, where she meets with other young business leaders to drive positive change in their community.

Denny Daniel

Denny Daniel curator and founder of The Museum of Interesting Things a traveling interactive demonstration/exhibition of antiques and inventions that goes to schools and events and inspires kids and adults to be curious and to tinker. He is also on the board or the 19th Century Society part of the Greater Astoria Historical Society and on the Advisory Board of the Beaux Arts Society and on the Advisory Board of the New York Stereoscopic Society and an Organizer for the Steampunk Meet. Denny Daniel has worked as a filmmaker and photo restorer for such companies as The Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island Foundation, Songs of Love, and the New York Times. His education includes degrees in International Economics and Politics, and Literature/History at New York University. In addition, he also studied at Corpus Christi College at Oxford and at FIT. He has lectured at Columbia University and NYU, and worked on two films that won the Sundance Film Festival. Heralded in the NY Times, appeared on the History Channel, The Science Channel and over 20 publications and presented at 4 TEDx talks, Daniel teaches through touch and feel allowing participants to actually interact with historical items and learn from the past to invent a better future. Amassing his collection of antiques for over twenty years, and having had over 20 museum and gallery exhibitions of his own work at locations ranging from the Chelsea Art Museum in NYC to the Hermitage in Russia, he decided to use his knowledge, experience, contacts and extensive collection to start The Museum of Interesting Things.

Gideon Rose

Gideon Rose has been the Editor of Foreign Affairs since 2010, after serving as Managing Editor of the magazine from 2000-2010. Prior to that he was Deputy Director of Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and from 1994-1995 he served as Associate Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. He has taught American foreign policy at Princeton and Columbia Universities. He is the author of How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (Simon & Schuster) and has edited numerous collections including Understanding the War on Terror, America and the World, and How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War.

Justin Christopher

Justin Christopher is a Director at Year Up, a nonprofit that equips low-income young adults with technology-based skills and corporate internships. Previously, he worked for Booz & Company, American Express, The New York Times, and The Huffington Post. He holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Born and raised in Queens, he enjoys traveling, and his interests include technology and entrepreneurship.

Justin Lafazan

Featured in Forbes, USA Today, The Huffington Post, Inc. Magazine and more, Justin Lafazan (20) is an acclaimed entrepreneur, speaker, best-selling author and consultant. The Founder of Next Gen and best-selling author of What Wakes You Up?, he’s on a mission to inspire the world’s young people to design the lives they want to live, through entrepreneurship.

Kumesh Aroomoogan

Kumesh Aroomoogan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Accern, a startup applying artificial intelligence to derive trading analytics from 20 million news and blog sources in real-time. Accern currently serves some of the largest quantitative hedge funds worldwide. Kumesh has worked side-by-side with multiple hedge funds in helping them integrate social media data into their automated trading strategies. Prior to Accern, Kumesh worked in corporate finance at Citigroup, SIFMA, and Ford Foundation. He graduated Pace University with a BBA in Public Accounting in 2014. Kumesh also writes for Forbes Magazine covering Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Quant Finance.

Michael Honsberger

Michael (Mike) Honsberger is the STEM project manager and lecturer for the Yale Young Global Scholars. Mike received his Bachelor’s in Psychology and Master’s in Applied Cognitive Science from the University of Guelph before being awarded his Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from McGill University. He then conducted research as a postdoctoral fellow in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. His research focused on mechanisms of memory destabilization and applications of these mechanisms in psychopathologies characterized by pathological memory including PTSD, addiction and schizophrenia. Prior to his current position, Mike was a Yale Summer Session instructor and adjunct professor of Psychology at Quinnipiac University, University of New Haven and Southern Connecticut State University.

Shivika Sinha

Shivika Sinha is a leader in guiding businesses to have a positive environmental and social impact, and an expert in marketing to the conscious consumer. She is Director of Digital at Alex & Ani, a brand that creates eco-conscious jewelry and has donated over $36M to humanitarian causes. Alongside women like Arianna Huffington, she is a member of The Real-Time Academy Of Short Form Arts & Sciences where she judges the Social Good prize at the Shorty Awards. Shivika serves on the Advisory Board of The Pivot Conference and advises the Novus Summit at the United Nations General Assembly. She is also an Influencer on the Mogul platform. Shivika was raised in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, Bangladesh and India.