Theme: Beyond Limits

Beyond Limits is TEDxUCR's Spring 2023 annual TEDx conference! We will be featuring six speakers from UCR sharing ideas on how they are re-envisioning and re-inventing areas of astronomy, psychology, and technology. Free and open to all! Check out our speaker line up and RSVP at tedxucr.org.

UC Riverside
900 University Avenue
Psychology Department
Riverside, California, 92521
United States

Elissa Monteiro

Psychology PhD candidate at University of California, Riverside

Elissa Monteiro is a fourth year PhD candidate in School Psychology at the University of California Riverside. Her research broadly focuses on refining the assessment of executive functioning and evaluating novel interventions for children with neurodevelopmental disabilities and their families. Her practical work with students in schools has inspired the formulation of several research questions and novel ideas around how best to support the development of executive function skills that predict students’ behavioral, socioemotional, and academic challenges.

Ethan Castro

Co-Founder of EDGE Sound Research

Dr. Ethan Castro is a hard-of-hearing music producer, songwriter, engineer and inventor with Tourette’s Syndrome. Ethan is a PhD graduate from UC Riverside where he invented a patent-pending audio technology that allows people to simultaneously hear and feel audio in high-fidelity. Ethan serves as CTO of EDGE Sound Research, Vice President of EDGE Original Inc., and is the founder of the EARS Student Group. Ethan’s forthcoming dissertation on tactile audio/multimodal composition, and a lifetime of practicing visual and touch-based hearing compensation methods positions him as a leader in audio innovation and multi-sensory experiences.

Katherine Morrissette

Neuroscience Student at University of California, Riverside

Katherine Morrissette is an award-winning author who is currently working towards an honors degree in neuroscience at UC Riverside. She works as a research assistant in a behavioral neuroscience laboratory that studies the etiology and effects of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder in mouse models. She is passionate about educating on the value and applicability of scientific research in people’s everyday lives and she intends to pursue an M.D.-Ph.D. so that she can continue her educational outreach and research efforts. Morrissette has been faced with many barriers on her journey to become a woman in STEM, so her core mission is to remind those with a passion to never give up.

Rachel Wu

Associate Professor of Psychology at University of California, Riverside

Dr. Rachel Wu is an Associate Professor of Psychology at University of California, Riverside. She completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London (2011). She is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist investigating how we learn and attend across the lifespan. Dr. Wu received a Rising Star award from the Association for Psychological Science and an NSF CAREER award grant to investigate the role of learning new skills on cognitive and functional growth in older adulthood. She was in a rock band as a violinist for 7 years (2003-2010) and also is a professional painter. Every few years, she learns to master new skills to gain a better understanding of the difficulties in being an adult learner.

Stephen Kane

Professor of Planetary Astrophysics at the University of California, Riverside

Dr. Stephen Kane is a Professor of Planetary Astrophysics at the University of California, Riverside. His work covers a broad range of topics and he has discovered hundreds of planets orbiting other stars. He is a leading expert on the topic of planetary habitability, the habitable zone of planetary systems, and the study of why Venus and Earth underwent divergent evolutions. He has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers as well as several books on the topic of exoplanets and habitability. He is also a prominent scientific leader for several NASA missions designed to search for life in the universe.

Yue Dong

Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Riverside

Dr. Yue Dong is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California Riverside. Her research interests include natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. She leads the Natural Language Processing group, which develops natural language understanding and generation systems that are controllable, trustworthy, and efficient.