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).

Theater de Kampanje
Willemsoor 63
Den Helder, Noord-Holland, 1781 AS
Netherlands

Benjamin Fro

Benjamin Fro is a Dutch rapper and poet who watches society with a philosophical and critical view. Benjamin Fro inspirers his listeners in English or Dutch. With creative wordplay and sharp punchlines Fro moves every audience physically and mentally.

Cris Toala Olivares

Cris Toala Olivares is born in Ecuador living in the Netherlands. He has been traveling the world for decades as a professional photographer.

David Robson

David Robson is an award-winning science writer specialising in psychology, neuroscience and medicine. After graduating in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, he became a feature editor joining New Scientist – the UK’s most popular science magazine. He was later a senior journalist at the BBC, before writing his first book, The Intelligence Trap, published by Hodder & Stoughton (UK) and WW Norton(USA) in 2019. His second book, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life, was published by Canongate/Henry Holt in 2022. It examines cutting-edge science showing the many ways that our beliefs create self-fulfilling prophecies – and how we can use this to our advantage. David’s writing has appeared in the Guardian, Popular Science, Men’s Health, the Atlantic the Psychologist. In 2021, he received awards from the Association of British Science Writers and the UK Medical Journalists’ Association for his writing on misinformation and risk communication during the COVID pandemic, in 2022 he was a finalist for the British Science Journalist of the Year award. To find out more about David, visit www.davidrobson.me

Edwin Gardner

Futurist

Edwin Gardner is futuroloog en mede-oprichter van Studio Monnik, zijn creatieve studio en futurologie praktijk. Hij helpt mensen om een langer nu en een groter hier in beeld te krijgen aan de hand van futuristische verkenningen en cultuur-historische denkramen. Om zoveel mogelijk mensen hier deelgenoot van te maken publiceert hij samen met collega-futuroloog Christiaan Fruneaux wekelijks de Chrononauten en de Atlas van het Lange Nu. Als meer wil weten en de Atlas van het Lange Nu ook wil ontvangen, ga naar: dechrononauten.nl

Erik Verheul

Engineer

Erik is an engineer, and that defines the way he sees the world. Whether it is in election observation, mountaineering, sailing or Arctic travel, he always wonders what makes it work.

Hein Noortman

Hein Noortman is an entrepreneur, business advisor and speaker. He inspires people on themes as resilience leadership and safety leadership. He is also ambassador for the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and started a fundraising; check www.laatblindenweerzien.nl to find out more or do the blind city experience on www.theblindexperience.nl

Jeroen Krouwels

Jeroen Krouwels was trained as a teacher in the 1980s but did not find work. Retrained as an ICT expert, he has devoted his entire career to applying ICT in education and L&D. He is seen as one of the founders of the e-learning industry in The Netherlands. Today he is the director of hihaho.com, a global layer technology platform for interactive video. As a guest lecturer at the Foundation for Corporate Education and SBO in the Netherlands, he also trains teachers and L&D professionals in redesigning education and training. As a guest speaker, he is regularly asked to give his vision on learning and technology.

Jim van Belzen

Jim van Belzen is a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). As an ecologist and modeler in the Estuarine and Delta Systems department. Here, he is trying to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics and resilience of complex coastal ecosystems. He is fascinated by how interactions between plants and animals, seawater and sediment determine the self-organization, stability and adaptability of coastal ecosystems. His ambition is to use these insights to develop sustainable ecosystem-based solutions as hi-tech to mitigate climate change and cope with the consequences like sea level rise. He urges us to protect coasts without towering dikes or dams and costs as the result of conventional engineering. But, switch to emergent engineering by bringing back natural processes, multiple regulating functions and biodiversity. The added value that restoring coastal marshes provides.

Joyce de Ruiter

At the age of 16 Joyce was told that around the age of 40 she will be almost deaf and blind and she would be of no value to this society. At that moment she was faced with a choice: to accept her role as an eternal victim or to look at what would still be possible and get the most out of that. After years of working in the corporate sector, Joyce now runs her own company as a public speaker on the themes agility, resilience and leadership. Joyce shares her story about how she copes with her continuously changing perspective in life. She provides insights how to develop an agile mindset that can help you to remain master of the changes in your life. You will experience that any change can be the catalyst or breeding ground for future opportunities and successes. She’s also the author of Niet horen, niet zien, niet zwijgen (Not to hear, not to see, not to be silent). It’s a beautiful autobiographical story about living in haste, the quest to deal with the continuous process of change and the growing conviction that she has got a powerful message to share with the world. Because the fact that in due time she will soon lose the ability to hear and see, does not necessarily mean that she will become silent. To find out more about Joyce, visit her website: www.joycederuiter.nl

Marije Dijksma

PR expert

Marije obtained her Masters degree in ‘European Governance’. She has worked for the Public Affairs team at Tata Steel for the last three years, where she focuses on the organisations transition to becoming a sustainable industry, whilst maintaining contact with the government, politicians and NGO’s.

Mark Tuitert

Olympic speed skater

Mark Tuitert is an Olympic, World, European and Dutch champion speed skater and Sportsman of the Year (2010). Since his retirement as a professional athlete, he a highly sought-after keynote speaker, entrepreneur, DRIVE podcast host and a Dutch TV-pundit. Mark talks, writes and thinks about what it means to be driven and to live a good life. He aims to contribute to the world being a better place if we would learn to adopt the lessons the ancient Stoic philosophers gave us into our daily lives. To find out more about Mark visit: https://marktuitert.nl/en

Merel Pontier

Lawyer

Merel Pontier is a criminal defense attorney in Texas, the USA. In 2019, Merel moved from her home country the Netherlands to the United States to go to law school, become a defense attorney, and help those wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. Merel is the first attorney in Texas who was able to bail out a former death-sentenced individual. Merel works for the Clinton Young Foundation, a non-profit organization that focuses on wrongfully convicted people in Texas. To find out more about Merel's work, visit www.clintonyoungfoundation.com.

Merijn de Boer

Thanks to well-balanced combinations of audio, video and interaction, scenes created in games bring to mind the works of Caspar David Friedrich and Arnold Böcklin. American Luminism of the late 19th century and European naturalism in landscape painting from that period also seem to be important sources of inspiration for the overwhelming landscapes, atmosphere and lighting in games. In only fifty years, the game industry grew to become the largest entertainment industry in the world; larger than the music and film industry combined. A lot happened between Pong (1972) and the award-winning Horizon Zero Dawn (2017). Enhanced interaction and an unparalleled level of realism transformed traditional skill-based games into genuine arthouse productions. The fact that the medium can even invoke feelings of pride and regret is unique. In this TEDx talk, Merijn shares how designers achieve perfection and convince players that although game worlds are virtual, memories and emotions experienced there are, in fact, real.

Pieter Roelfsema

Pieter Roelfsema is director of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam and professor at the Free University of Amsterdam and at the AUMC in Amsterdam. He was trained as medical doctor but works as scientist aiming to understand how the information that enters our eye is transformed into meaning. He develops the neurotechnology for high-bandwidth visual prostheses for blind people, aiming to restore a rudimentary form of sight.

Rico Bakker

Rico Bakker is a Dutch podcast maker, writer and professional keynote speaker. He uses the power of bad ideas to find rather unconventional answers to essential matters and help people detach from their regular perspectives.

Sanne van Baar

After a career in media and a big fat burnout, Sanne van Baar started as a volunteer at Clean2Anywhere, an organization that is building a 17th century merchant ship from recycled plastic. This experiment led to great unexpected discoveries with a huge social and circular impact. All by rethinking waste and turn it around to create solutions for a circular economy. Visit www.clean2a.nl for more info. After working as a journalist for years, Sanne had several different media jobs in the corporate world before she started working as a communication advisor at Clean2Anywhere.

Thijs Biersteker

Artist

Artist Thijs Biersteker collaborates with the top climate scientists in the world to make us feel the facts again. His art installations seamlessly combining art and science to help us imagine the climate crisis. His works are shown all over the world helping millions of people imagine how quickly deforestation is happening, how plastic pollutes our oceans, and how trees experience climate change. Thijs and his team at Woven studio are providing the essential missing part in science communication that fits this generation. You can find out how on www.thijsbiersteker.com, or get a mix of art and science in your feed on Instagram on https://www.instagram.com/thijs_biersteker/

Yanaika Zomer

Yanaika Zomer is a writer and a journalist. She is the city poet of her hometown Den Helder and has a weekly column on love in a Dutch newspaper.

Yann Müller

LEGO designer

Almost every one of us has built Lego at some point in our lives. But even though we all seem to enjoy building Lego, a lot of us stop to build once we get older. And this exact lack of motivation to keep on building and designing new things is part of the reason why we currently are in a worldwide engineer shortage. In this Ted Talk, Yann Müller talks about the similarities of building Lego and the work of Engineers, and how he thinks we can use Lego to motivate young people for engineering careers again. Yann Müller has always been a very passionate Lego builder since as long as he can remember, spending a lot of his free time building models and sharing them online. In 2021 he started his own web shop called “brickships.ch” where people can buy instructions and sets of his designs.