TEDxWesleyanU features diverse speakers with leaders from across the world.

Ring Family Performing Arts Hall (Tentative)
45 Wyllys Ave
Middletown, Connecticut, 06459
United States

Aaron Painter

Vice President, Microsoft China

Aaron Painter is a best-selling author and the global executive who is passionate about how listening empowers people and organizational growth. As Vice President and General Manager at Microsoft in China, he leads a broad team of sales, marketing, product, and partner management professionals. He is also an executive sponsor for Microsoft’s rising millennial workforce of recent hires from top undergraduate and MBA programs. Painter has lived and worked in six countries across four continents, and exemplifies a new generation of global leaders. He is a highly sought-after speaker and advisor to companies that are seeking business transformation.

Anand Kini

CFO, NBCUniversal

Mr. Anand Kini has been the Chief Financial Officer of NBCUniversal Media, LLC since May 2015. Mr. Kini served as an Executive Vice President of Strategy and Business Insights at NBCUniversal Media, LLC and shapes and develops its long term strategic direction and is responsible for data-driven consumer and business insights.

Angela Yee

Radio personality

Angela Yee was born and raised in Brooklyn. She graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in English. After college, Angela became assistant to the CEO of Wu-Tang Corporation. Having a knack for marketing she spent the next five years working with internet startups, a distribution label, and clothing brands. A few years later she became a morning show host at Sirius Satellite Radio after establishing her niche in a memorable interview with Jay-Z. After pitching her own weekly nighttime show called “Lip Service,” The show was the only female-hosted program on Shade 45. After six years at Shade 45 Angela left to work with New York City’s Power 105.1 and formed ‘The Breakfast Club’ with DJ Envy and Charlamagne Tha God . Fast forward, the nationally syndicated morning show is now heard 30 markets weekday mornings and over 70 markets on the weekend. Angela donates her time and effort to speaking at schools, educational panels, other charitable organizations.

Anthony Hatch

Sociologist and Professor

Dr. Anthony Hatch is associate professor of Science in Society, Sociology, and African American Studies at Wesleyan University. His research and teaching focus on science, medicine, technology, and social inequalities. He is the author of Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) which critiques how biomedical scientists, government researchers, and drug companies use concepts of race and ethnicity to study and treat something called “metabolic syndrome.” He is a proud member of the Black Phoenix Rising Collective and the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network and held a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health at the Morehouse School of Medicine. Currently, Dr. Hatch is finishing a new book tentatively titled Silent Cells that examines how social institutions use psychotropic drugs to manage the thought and behavior of institutionalized populations.

Dan Drew

Mayor, Middletown, CT

Dan Drew is the third-term Mayor of Middletown, CT and has overseen an explosion in economic growth in Middletown since taking office in 2011.

Lily Herman

Writer and Activist

Lily Herman is a contributing editor at Refinery29, where she writes political commentary and does original news reporting. In addition, she regularly contributes to Teen Vogue and Allure, covering the intersection of topics such as politics, youth empowerment, wellness, feminism, and more. She's also the founder of Get Her Elected, a network of over 2,000 people offering skills like writing and graphic design pro bono to more than 200 progressive women candidates running for U.S. political office. You can check out her personal website at lilyherman.com and find her perpetually on Twitter at @lkherman.

Lucy Hutner

Women's Reproductive Psychiatrist

Lucy A. Hutner, M.D. is a nationally recognized expert in the field of reproductive psychiatry and women’s mental health. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wesleyan University in 1992, Dr. Hutner received her M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She has held numerous academic leadership positions, including as the associate director of the Women’s Program at Columbia. In 2015, she was inducted into the American College of Psychiatrists, which has an elite membership of fewer than one thousand psychiatrists nationwide. Dr. Hutner is part of the leadership team of the National Task Force for Women’s Reproductive Mental Health, which is creating the first standardized digital curriculum for students and trainees in reproductive psychiatry. She has lectured and taught both locally and nationwide, has co-authored numerous academic publications, and has been cited in the national media, including Pregnantish, Mic, and Baby Center

Maria Santana

Correspondent, CNN En Español

Maria Santana is a New York based anchor and correspondent for CNN En Español and frequent contributor to all CNN networks and platforms. She is a two-time News and Documentary Emmy nominee who handles a wide range of topics, from breaking news, politics and finance to sports and entertainment.

Matthew Lesser

Connecticut State Representative

State Representative Matt Lesser is serving his fifth term in the Connecticut House of Representatives, representing the City of Middletown. In January, 2015 Speaker Sharkey appointed Rep. Lesser co-chair of the General Assembly’s Banking Committee. Lesser is also a member of the Government Administration and Elections Committee and a member of the Insurance and Real Estate Committee. He has been a principal author of a number of important laws, including Connecticut’s first in the nation Student Loan Bill of Rights, a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing waste and a major workplace safety law later adopted as a national standard. Representative Lesser has championed Middletown’s interests in the legislature, significantly expanding funding for local roads and schools and securing millions of dollars to help rebuild Middletown’s waterfront. Matt attended Wesleyan University and lives in Middletown’s North End. He previously served on Middletown’s Planning and Zoning Commission.

Michael Yamashita

Photographer, National Geographic

Photographer Michael Yamashita has been shooting for the National Geographic magazine for over 30 years, combining his dual passions of photography and travel. After graduating from Wesleyan University with a degree in Asian studies, he spent seven years in Asia, which became his photographic area of specialty. Upon returning to the US, Yamashita began shooting for the National Geographic as well as other American and international magazines and clients. While not traveling, Michael Yamashita lives with his family in rural New Jersey, where he maintains a studio and is an active volunteer fireman.

Mohamad Hafez

Architect and Artist

Mohamad Hafez is an interdisciplinary artist and architect born in Syria, raised in Saudi Arabia and educated in the Midwestern United States. Hafez uses his expertise as a licensed AIA architect as well as his lived experience of Damascus’s rich built environment to create lyrical streetscapes high in fidelity and charged in content. His sculptural compilations of paint, metal, and found objects anchor uneasy conversations, stimulating deeper audience engagement on contentious topics like torture at Abu Ghraib, tyranny in the twenty-first century, or the ongoing global refugee crisis. Hafez has exhibited at UNICEF House, NYC; Orlando Museum of Art, Florida; Artspace, New Haven; and Contemporary Art Platform, Kuwait, among others. He has received national attention in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR. Hafez is currently full-time with the firm Pickard Chilton and was Project Lead Designer on the 2017 50-story, 1.5 million GSF office tower 609 Main in downtown Houston, TX.

Sallomé Hralima

Director, The Future Project

Dream Director Sallomé Hralima works to to unleash the individual and collective genius of others. She challenges the nature of American workplaces, to cultivate the possibility of people and acknowledge the danger of looking at employees as resources.

Sharon Belden Castonguay

Director, Gordon Career Center

Sharon Belden Castonguay, EdD, is an adult developmental psychologist and career counselor with twenty years of experience working with professionals at all levels of their careers. She is the Director of Wesleyan University's Gordon Career Center and the host of two podcasts, Careers by Design: The Interviews and First Year Out. Prior to joining Wesleyan's team she was the Director of the Graduate Career Management Center at Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business. She has also served as a career counselor at Harvard University and at Boston University's Questrom School of Business. Through her career consulting practice she has worked with many other top universities, and has been an invited speaker at Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard Medical School, The New York Academy of Sciences, and Princeton, among others. She received her doctorate in human development from Harvard. She also holds an MA in Education from the University of Michigan and a BA in Government from Smith College.