Theme: Boundless

The world is evolving at an ever-increasing rate. Education, science, technology, and art change unrelentingly. With this change comes a growing set of challenges that face society on both a global and individual level. This dynamic environment forces humanity to think differently and with a new perspective as it works to solve a vast array of multiplex problems.

ASU embraces this complex challenge and teaches its students how be “master learners, capable of learning anything throughout their lives” under the slogan, Learn to thrive. Through its mission and charter, ASU embraces the concept of purpose-based discovery and takes responsibility for the global community it serves.

TEDxASU leverages ASU’s values and explores the ideas surrounding an adaptive, transdisciplinary, and creative society in its 2018 event: Boundless. Boundless is defined as having no boundaries; not limited in any way; infinite.

We invite you to join us at the Tempe Center for the Arts on March 31st, 2018 for TEDxASU: Boundless and an evening of science, technology, arts and community.

Tempe Center for the Arts
700 W Rio Salado Pkwy
Tempe, Arizona, 85281
United States

Alexa Scholl

Alexa Scholl attends Barrett, the Honors College studying Political Science and Spanish. She will graduate with her Bachelor of Arts in December 2018 and plans to attend Law School. In November 2017, she was elected to the Prescott City Council with the highest number of votes of all five candidates and, at just 20 years old, is the youngest council member in recent Prescott history. She is also currently the youngest council member in the state of Arizona. Alexa is a Tillman Scholar at ASU which is a highly competitive leadership program that studies the servant leadership values influenced by Pat Tillman’s life. Alexa ran for City Council because she wants to serve the community that raised her and inspire other young people to become involved in politics. Her work on the Prescott City Council has focused on engaging constituents in local government.

Alireza Bahremand

Alireza Bahremand is currently pursuing his BSc and Masters in Software Engineering at Arizona State University. He is a Research Developer under Arizona State’s AME METEOR Lab, working with Mixed Reality technology. His current research revolves around enhancing educational communication and collaboration through Mixed Reality technology. Bahremand is also the President of the Computer Science Club on Arizona State’s Polytechnic Campus. In his free time Bahremand enjoys participating in Hackathons and does some freelance Software Development on the side. He also enjoys Virtual Reality Art and has been fortunate enough to have had pieces promoted on the Google Tilt Brush featured page.

Andrew Thoesen

Andrew Thoesen is a mechanical engineering student at Arizona State University. After living in Indiana for 23 years and obtaining his undergraduate degree from Purdue University, he worked as an engineer in industry for several years before returning to graduate school. Originally exploring hand prosthetics, his focus area shifted after his lab’s departure in his first year. He has been exploring space systems and design ever since, first by leading the design of the AOSAT cubesat followed by examining mobility in granular space environments. His current research examines mobility on lunar and asteroid surfaces and he recently completed a summer working at NASA to better familiarize himself with simulating lunar conditions. Aside from research, Andrew also enjoys engaging the public about space research. He has spoken at Phoenix Comicon, Ignite Phoenix #18 event, and the Scottsdale Public Library system about his work and the future of space engineering. Currently he is engaged in an outreach project to bring NASA-designed science experiments and robotic arm building to a group of 30 8th graders. When he isn’t working on his research he enjoys the Arizona outdoors by hiking with his wife, camping, reading, and writing fiction and non-fiction.

Ashleigh King

Ashleigh seeks to change the world through education. She prepares teachers to embody the role of a “world-changer” by relentlessly pursuing excellence for ALL children in ALL facets of their lives. Ms. King empowers future teachers and leaders to engage with communities to develop unstoppable individuals who will collectively have a positive impact on society. Ms. King works to instill a sense of relentless and unlimited positivity in the more than 900 future teachers she has prepared for the classroom. She has a multitude of evidence suggesting that the single biggest factor in the classroom is the teachers capacity for positive thoughts, words, actions, and habits. Ms. King recognizes that world changing positivity can overcome cycles of poverty, abuse, and other adverse childhood experiences. Ms. King strongly believes that students can achieve limitless potential, and teachers can remain immune to external negative forces when positive thinking and actions are taught as skills and not simply believed to be inherent traits or mindsets. Ms. King’s commitment to education has been recognized by her receiving Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Faculty Award for Community Engagement, Arizona Technology in Education Association’s Pre-Service Faculty of the Year Award, Teach for America’s Paula Jennings Hardison Award, and Glendale Elementary School District’s Challenger Teacher of the Year Award.

Balanding Manneh

Balanding is a Mastercard Foundation Scholar and an undergraduate student in the School of Life Sciences, and Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University studying Biological Sciences. Born and raised in The Gambia, West Africa, he is interested in hunger and malnutrition eradication especially in developing countries, and understanding how hunger and malnutrition make individuals in these communities more vulnerable to infectious diseases. He is the founder of Rural Impact, a non-profit organization that empowers smallholder farmers in rural communities in his native country to increase food production and enable them combat hunger and food insecurity. Balanding is an undergraduate researcher in the Cease Lab where he conducts research with Dr. Cease on locusts which are a major crop pest in many countries of the world. His vision is to see a world in which people have access to food regardless of their income levels or where they live.

Jason Thompson

Jason Thompson (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is an Assistant Professor of Music Learning and Teaching in the Herberger Institute for Design and Arts at Arizona State University. At ASU, he teaches courses and conducts research that explores sociocultural issues in music learning and teaching, socially engaged practice in the arts, and musical engagement in cultural contexts. His most popular course is the Gospel Choir, a credit-bearing ensemble comprised of singers who reflect racial, gender, age, musical, and religious diversities. The increase in the ensemble’s membership by 914% over a two-year period has been serendipitous for the Herberger Institute, which seeks to project music and musical practices typically underrepresented in higher education. Dr. Thompson is a recent recipient of a 10K grant from the National Association for Music Education to explore the community cultural wealth that 13- to 18-year olds in the Phoenix region utilize to do music. Dr. Thompson and his research team of faculty peers and doctoral students believe understanding how young people utilize these community resources, as well as where they face limitations, may help the profession develop more effective ways to bridge school and community partnerships and to foster inclusive musical opportunities for underrepresented and underserved young people.

John Rome

John Rome is the Deputy CIO and a Voice Evangelist at Arizona State University (ASU). He is an experienced IT leader, educator, consultant, technologist and innovator with a long history of working in higher education. John is a pioneer of data warehousing in higher education, building ASU’s data warehouse in the early 1990’s. He is also an instructor in the ASU W.P. Carey School of Business. His areas of expertise include information technology strategy, analytics/business intelligence, data governance, organization development, program management, big data, public cloud development and deployment, and most recently, voice-enabled interfaces. His special interests include student mentoring, learning science and now voice enabling the world. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Clarke University (Iowa) and a MBA from Arizona State University and is a two-time recipient of ASU’s President’s Award for Innovation.

Nikki Stevens

Nikki Stevens is a software engineer, open-source contributor, and advocate for ethical, inclusive and anti-racist engineering practices. She has been an active Drupal community member for the last 10 years and, in 2016, founded the Drupal Diversity & Inclusion (DD&I) group specifically to make Drupal a safe(r) space for minority-identified contributors. The DD&I team has expanded the group from five to five hundred members, organized events at DrupalCons and developed new contributor mentorship and training pathways. At ASU, Nikki currently a PhD student in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program, where she is studying software engineering ethics and creating experimental feminist technologies.

Tanya Harrison

Dr. Tanya Harrison calls herself a “professional martian.” She has spent the last decade working as a scientist and in mission operations on multiple NASA Mars missions, including the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers. Her specialty lies in geomorphology: the study of a planet’s evolution based on its surface features. Before Mars however, Tanya had her head in the stars as an astronomer studying the metal content of star clusters and recurring novae systems. She holds a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of Western Ontario, a Masters in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Wesleyan University, and a B.Sc. in Astronomy and Physics from the University of Washington. Currently she is the Director of Research for Arizona State University’s Space Technology and Science (“NewSpace”) Initiative. Tanya is also an advocate for advancing the status of women in science and for accessibility in the geosciences. You can find her prolifically tweeting about the Red Planet—and her experiences with both #WomenInSTEM and #DisabledInSTEM—as @tanyaofmars. (As a huge foodie however, she’ll likely never choose to make the journey to Mars herself.)

Walter Crutchfield

Walter Crutchfield is a partner at Vintage Partners, a Phoenix, Ariz.-based commercial real estate development and investment company, as well as a fourth generation Arizonan whose family has been developing land locally since 1961. He has been a leading executive of numerous companies, including Master Sports Inc., Computer Decisions International Inc., Solaire and Jonesport Sports Management. Prior to the formation of Vintage Partners, Mr. Crutchfield had been a principal in Crutchfield and Associates and C2 Commercial Properties, The Paladin Group and Pentad Investments. He has led the acquisition through entitlement of a diverse portfolio of residential, resort, commercial and industrial land holdings. Most recently, Mr. Crutchfield has lead the urban redevelopment arm of Vintage Partner’s portfolio, acquiring historically relevant landmarks and giving them new life through mindful restoration and precise local, regional and national tenant mixes. A finalist for the Phoenix Business Journal’s “Businessperson of the Year” in 2017, Mr. Crutchfield’s signature project, Uptown Plaza, was also a finalist for “Retail Development of the Year” at the 2017 RED Awards. Crutchfield enters 2018 with three landmark projects in the works, including the adaptive reuse Arrive Hotels development in Phoenix, Timber Sky dark skies-certified housing development in Flagstaff, and Mill Town, a 1M square foot student housing and transit development in Flagstaff.