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).

Douglass Ballroom
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York, 14627
United States

Anis Kallel

Anis Kallel was born and raised in Tunisia, North Africa. He moved to the US for college and attended the University of Rochester where he studied Computer Science and Business. During these 4 years, he was involved in research on Human-Computer Interaction, and spent time in Silicon Valley interning at Electronic Arts (E.A) and Microsoft. Having developed an interest and a passion for emerging markets, he took a job with the Swiss investment group Seedstars as their associate for Africa. There, he got the opportunity to travel to 16 Sub-Saharan African countries in 2017 to identify the best early stage startups, and was inspired to move back to Tunisia as the Co-Founder and CTO of a FinTech company called Kaoun (Universe, in Arabic) working on Payment and Credit solutions adapted to the Middle Eastern and African markets.

Claudia Gordon

Claudia Gordon is a Director of Government and Compliance with Sprint Accessibility. Sprint Accessibility, a Business Unit within Sprint Corporation, offers communication products and services to reduce or eliminate communication barriers for customers who are deaf, hard of hearing, deaf-blind, have a hearing or vision loss, or cognitive, speech or mobility disability. Prior to joining Sprint Accessibility in March 2017, Claudia was a member of the Obama Administration from December 2009 to January 2017 initially serving as Special Assistant to the Director of the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) and then as OFCCP’s Chief of Staff. OFCCP is a worker protection agency that enforces the civil rights of American workers who either work for or seek employment with companies that benefit from government contracts. From July 2013 to March 2014 Claudia conducted a temporary assignment with the White House Office of Public Engagement where she was an Associate Director of Public Engagement. In that capacity, she served as the liaison to the disability community and advised on disability policies. Notably, Claudia served as a member of President Obama’s Presidential Delegation to the Opening Ceremony of the 2016 Paralympic Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, Federative Republic of Brazil. Prior to DOL she was a Senior Policy Advisor with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In 2000, Claudia received the prestigious Skadden Fellowship to work as a staff attorney with the National Association of the Deaf Law and Advocacy Center. She also worked as a consulting attorney with the National Council on Disability. Claudia, a native of Jamaica W.I., graduated with honors from Howard University in Washington, DC in 1995 and went on to complete law school with honors at American University’s Washington College of Law in 2000.

James McGrath

Professor McGrath graduated from Arizona State with a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering. He earned a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1994 and a PhD in Biological Engineering from Harvard/MIT's Division of Health Sciences and Technology in 1998. He then trained as a Distinguished Post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. Since 2001, Professor McGrath has been on the Biomedical Engineering faculty at the University of Rochester where he directed the graduate program in BME for a decade and now serves as the Associate Director of the microfabrication and metrology core (URNano). While historically, Professor McGrath's research was focused on the phenomena of cell migration, since 2007 he has been leading an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional team that is developing and applying ultrathin membrane technologies. Professor McGrath is a co-founder, current director and past president of SiMPore Inc., a company founded to commercially manufacture nanomembranes. In 2015 he was elected as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He has co-authored 11 issued and pending patents and more than 70 scientific publications.

Jay Gillen

Jay Gillen has taught and organized in and around Baltimore City Public Schools since 1987. In 1994, after a two-year organizing campaign, he became teacher-director of the new Stadium Middle School, the first community-controlled public school in Baltimore in many years. Working with graduates of the Stadium School, Gillen developed the peer-tutoring Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP) in 2001. Students working for the BAP as math literacy workers and student organizers have earned more than $4,000,000 since then. The BAP became entirely student-run in 2009, and is looked to around the country as a model for structuring student power in a sustainable way. In 2009, Gillen returned to full-time math teaching, co-teaching with BAP graduates to create near-peer learning communities for high-school students having trouble with math. Today, he teaches at the Waxter Juvenile Detention Center for Young Women, and is helping to develop a Peer-to- Peer Youth Enterprise Incubator, which has a goal of creating 200 knowledge-based peer-to- peer jobs serving 1,000 students in Baltimore by 2019. Gillen is the author of numerous articles and of the book, Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty. A companion volume, Uprooting Education: From Crawl Spaces to a Youth Economy will be published in 2019.

Josh Pachter

Josh Pachter was a senior at the University of Rochester studying Computer Science and Philosophy at the time of his talk. His key research interests center around robotics and machine ethics, with a focus in mitigating bias in morally consequential autonomous systems. In the past, Josh has worked at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, where he helped create intuitive control systems for a soft robotic glove to assist patients with an impaired ability to grip. He has also done research at the University of Rochester Human-Computer Interaction Lab where he worked on testing and optimizing a virtual agent that aims to help improve the conversational skills of its users. Following graduation, Josh is working at Amazon as a Software Development Engineer in Seattle, WA before pursuing graduate school in a few years’ time.

Lee Feinberg

Lee Feinberg is now the Optical Telescope Element (OTE) Manager for the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, a role he has been in since 2001. He is also the Technical Lead for Webb's combined OTE and Integrated Science Instrument Module (OTIS). Prior to joining Webb, Lee was the Assistant Chief for Technology in the Instrument Systems and Technology Division. For 10 years, Lee worked on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and was part of the team that developed the optical correction and upgrade instruments for Hubble, including serving as the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph Instrument Manager, Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) Concept Study Lead and the optics lead assigned to ensure the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) mirrors would work. Mr. Feinberg is an SPIE Fellow and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments and Systems. In his free time, the UR grad is also a pianist, keyboardist and composer. He currently plays in two bands: Outta Scope and the Allman Others.

Luke Wood

Luke Wood is president of Beats by Dr. Dre, a premium brand of headphones and speakers, which was acquired by Apple in 2014. A producer, guitarist and music industry vet with more that 20 years of experience, Luke has been involved with Beats since its early days, officially joining the company in 2011. Prior to that, Luke served as Chief Strategy Officer of Interscope Geffen A&M (IGA) and President of the imprint DGC Records, where he worked with artists including Weezer, All American Rejects, Rise Against, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, among many others. He began his career with Geffen Records in 1991 as a Director of Publicity, representing such bands as Nirvana and Sonic Youth. A lifelong songwriter and musician, Luke signed a publishing deal with Universal Music Group in 1996 and that same year his band, Sammy, released its third album, Tales of Great Neck Glory, on Geffen/DGC Records. In August 2014, Luke joined the Board of Directors for Fender Musical Instruments alongside U2’s Bono and The Edge. Luke earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University with a major in American Studies.

Malcolm Sutherland-Foggio

Malcolm Sutherland-Foggio has been battling cancer and related issues in the research lab as well as his own body for nine years. The youngest of three boys, 20-year- old Malcolm Sutherland-Foggio was an active healthy child until his hip began hurting in 2008. At the age of 10, he was diagnosed with Pelvic Ewing’s Sarcoma, a highly aggressive and malignant bone tumor. From the very beginning of his journey, Malcolm began publicly speaking out and raising funds through the sale of wristbands, all while enduring 14 rounds of chemotherapy, surgery to remove his hip, endless side effects, rehabilitation, and keeping up with schoolwork. Malcolm realized that he saw no awareness for pediatric cancers and learned that only 3% of cancer research funds are directed toward pediatrics. Due to these and many other influences, Malcolm incorporated a non-profit called Make Some Noise: Cure Kids Cancer, Inc. which has raised $2 million for pediatric cancer research since 2009.

Malcolm Sutherland=Foggio

Malcolm Sutherland-Foggio has been battling cancer and related issues in the research lab as well as his own body for nine years. The youngest of three boys, 20-year- old Malcolm Sutherland-Foggio was an active healthy child until his hip began hurting in 2008. At the age of 10, he was diagnosed with Pelvic Ewing’s Sarcoma, a highly aggressive and malignant bone tumor. From the very beginning of his journey, Malcolm began publicly speaking out and raising funds through the sale of wristbands, all while enduring 14 rounds of chemotherapy, surgery to remove his hip, endless side effects, rehabilitation, and keeping up with schoolwork. Malcolm realized that he saw no awareness for pediatric cancers and learned that only 3% of cancer research funds are directed toward pediatrics. Due to these and many other influences, Malcolm incorporated a non-profit called Make Some Noise: Cure Kids Cancer, Inc. which has raised $2 million for pediatric cancer research since 2009.

Ranveer Chandra

Ranveer Chandra is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research where he is leading an Incubation on IoT Applications. His research has shipped as part of multiple Microsoft products, including VirtualWiFi & low power Wi-Fi in Windows since 2009, Energy Profiler in Visual Studio, and the Wireless Controller Protocol for XBOX One. Ranveer is leading the FarmBeats, battery research, and TV white space projects at Microsoft Research. He has published over 80 papers, and filed over 100 patents, with over 80 granted by the USPTO. He has won several awards, including best paper awards at ACM CoNext 2008, ACM SIGCOMM 2009, IEEE RTSS 2014, USENIX ATC 2015, and Runtime Verification 2016 (RV’16), the Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship, the Microsoft Gold Star Award, the MIT Technology Review’s Top Innovators Under 35, TR35 (2010) and Fellow in Communications, World Technology Network (2012). Ranveer has an undergraduate degree from IIT Kharagpur, India and a PhD from Cornell University.

Rebecca Cokley

Rebecca Cokley just joined the Center for American Progress as the Senior Fellow for Disability Policy after wrapping up 4 years as the Executive Director of the National Council on Disability, an independent agency charged with advising Congress and the White House on issues of national disability public policy. She joined NCD in 2013 after serving 4 years in the Obama Administration including time at the Departments of Education, Health & Human Services, and a successful stint at the White House where she oversaw diversity and inclusion efforts. Rebecca got her feet wet in advocacy while working at the Institute for Educational Leadership for five years (04-09), building a number of tools and resources designed to empower and educate youth with disabilities and their adult allies. She has spent the last 15 years helping make stronger and deeper connections across civil rights communities and continues to see cross-movement solidarity as the only means of surviving these next years. Rebecca serves on the board of directors for Common Cause and the ACLU of the National Capital Region. In 2017 she and her family were featured as part of CNN’s #ToBeMe series. In 2015 she was inducted into the inaugural class of the Susan M. Daniels Disability Mentoring Hall of Fame and was the recipient of the Frank Harkin Memorial Award by the National Council on Independent Living. She is a Rockwood Leading From the Inside Out Fellow (2016-17). In 2008 she served on the leadership of the first ever Presidential Campaign Disability Policy Advisory Board, for then-Senator Barack Obama. She has spoken at Netroots Nation, New York City Comic-Con, and the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights. Rebecca has a B.A in Politics from the University of California Santa Cruz, is the proud spouse of Patrick and mother of Jackson and Kaya.

The Rochester Raging Grannies

The first group to call themselves "Raging Grannies" erupted on February 14, 1987 in Victoria, British Columbia. Several peace activists who had been doing street theater in the community began dressing up in outrageous hats and singing satirical songs to protest nuclear submarines, uranium mining, nuclear power, militarism, racism, clear-cut logging, and corporate greed. Raging Granny groups quickly sprang up across Canada, all the way to Charlottetown, PEI, and down the Pacific Coast into the USA by way of Seattle. There are now about 100 gaggles of Raging Grannies throughout the world. Rochester's Raging Grannies first raged in September, 2002, in response to proposed Monroe County Budget Cuts that threatened parks, libraries, and the entire system of social service delivery. The Rochester Raging Grannies are open to women of a certain age who have a sense of humor and a commitment to action. They are concerned with issues of social and economic justice, peace, and a healthy planet.

Tyler Socash

Tyler Socash believes in fostering a personal connection with our public lands through exposure, education, and stewardship. The day after completing his master’s degree at the University of Rochester, Socash embarked on a 7,000-mile thru-hiking journey across the Pacific Crest Trail, Te Araroa in New Zealand, and the Appalachian Trail. This grand immersion into wilderness inspired him to defend rare wildlife habitats in New York State's Adirondack Park. He joined the Adirondack Wilderness Advocates as an activist to promote the intangibles of wildness and their benefits to humanity. In an effort to meld humor with conservation efforts, Socash also co-created and co-hosts Foot Stuff Podcast, which spotlights outdoor adventure, antics, and activism around the country.