2018: UNCHARTED

The TEDxYale 2018 flagship conference had eight featured speakers and five student speakers. Each addressed their explorations of the Uncharted, the advances that had not yet been made, the issues that had not yet been pressed, and the work that had not yet been considered feasible. They asked us to consider, “what can we do to push forward the uncharted?”

Arsema Thomas

Charity, one hell of a drug

Arsema Thomas is a second-year MPH candidate studying Health Policy with a concentration in Global Health interested in the intersection of innovation and health policy. Having lived all over sub-Saharan Africa as a child, she was exposed to some of the injustices in the health field which led to her to the realization that innovation might be the solution to many of the region's problems.

Andrés Martin

Cycles: Rerouted

Andrés Martin, MD, MPH ’02 is the Riva Ariella Ritvo Professor at the Yale Child Study Center, where he serves as medical director of the Children’s Psychiatric Inpatient Service at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital. In 2017, he cycled across America for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s“Break the Cycle” initiative.

Leslie Browning

Writing on life

L.M. Browning is an award-winning author of eleven books whose writing explores the confluence of the natural landscape and the interior landscape. She is a graduate of the University of London, a Fellow with the International League of Conservation Writers,and sits on the Board of the IBPA. Browning founded Homebound Publications in 2011 and is also the Founder and Editor-in- Chief of The Wayfarer magazine.

James Kirchick

Free Speech

James Kirchick is a visiting fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe and Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. For over three years, Kirchick worked at The New Republic, where he covered domestic politics, lobbying, intelligence, and American foreign policy. He is a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year Award, and a professional member of the PEN American Center and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Varun Sivaram

We're doomed if solar energy stalls—here's how to keep it rising

Varun Sivaram is the Philip D. Reed fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the book Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet (MIT University Press, 2018). He has been called "The Hamilton of the Solar Industry" by a leading solar publication for his work in promoting the clean energy revolution.

Sophie Edelstein

The gift of adversity

Sophie Edelstein, 17, is a dually enrolled student at Wilbur Cross High School and Yale University. She was the third place Grand Award winner in biomedical engineering at the 2017 IntelInternational Science & Engineering Fair for her research pertaining to her own health challenges and, more recently, has been named one of Connecticut’s top Women in Innovation by the Connecticut Technology Council.

Allister Chang

Access vs. accessibility

Allister Chang is the Executive Director of Libraries Without Borders, a non-profit whose mission is to reinforce the autonomy of disadvantaged communities by expanding access to educational and cultural tools. Allister advocates for libraries to serve as spaces of innovation, economic development, and civic engagement and has given keynote addresses at the Quebec Library Association Annual Conference and the WISE Summit.

Michael Grome

The dialectic life

Michael holds B.S. degrees in Plant Molecular Biology and Natural Resource Management from Cornell University and is currently studying DNA Nanotechnology with Dr. Chenxiang Lin for his PhD in Cellular Biology at Yale University. He holds great interest in cognitive biases and epistemology and is working toward a career in applying agricultural biotechnology to advancing sustainable agriculture.

Billy Mills

Footprints

Billy Mills was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He made the Olympic team for the 1964 Tokyo Games in the marathon and the 10,000 meter run, in the latter of which he won the gold, a moment often lauded as the greatest upset in Olympic history. On February 15, 2013, the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to Billy Mills for his work with Running Strong.

Diana Henriques

Lessons from history's biggest Ponzi scheme

Diana B. Henriques, a former senior writer at The New York Times, is the author of A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday and the New York Times bestseller The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust, which was adapted by HBO into a film in 2017. She was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and has won a George Polk Award and Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize.

Evan Twarog

Searching for the pulse of technology

Evan Twarog is a Cadet at the United States Coast Guard Academy. As an Electrical Engineering student, he is interested in particular in how data analytics and artificial intelligence can be used to improve disaster response and humanitarian missions. During Hurricane Harvey, Evan helped lead the Coast Guard’s first “crisis mapping” response, the first time social media has played a major role in Coast Guard disaster response operations.

James Prosek

Why we draw

Artist, writer, naturalist, and Yale graduate James Prosek published his first book at nineteen years of age, Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America. Since then, Prosek’s work has been shown in museums all over the country. He has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine and is the author of eleven books for adults and children.

Chelsea Guo

Why AI is the most important issue of our generation

Chelsea is a senior at Yale completing a four-year joint B.S./M.S. degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and a B.A. in Political Science. Informed by her work at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, her senior thesis examines how the Chinese Communist Party has approached artificial intelligence technologies and creates metrics to track the politicization of AI in China and the United States.