TEDxBrownU 2016 will feature student and alumni speakers from Brown University sharing their ideas about entrepreneurship, research, personal growth, and more.

Martinos Auditorium, Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
174 Angell St.
Providence, Rhode Island, 02912
United States

Aderonke Ilegbusi

Aderonke is a first year Master of Public Health student. She enjoys volunteering, teaching, running, and being outdoors. One of her goals is to run in the Boston Marathon. In addition, she strongly believes in human empowerment. She believes every individual on earth possesses the right to succeed and reach their full potential.

Adi Melamed

Adi is a freshman at Brown likely studying computer science. He believes that ideas are most influential in shaping who we are and the collective world we live in. Ideally he’d like to spend his time spreading and exchanging ways of thinking, offering new mindsets, and creating the communities for others to do the same. Adi sees himself doing the former two through professional speaking, storytelling, and blogging and looks to use entrepreneurship to create new networks and communities that allow for the effective exchange of ideas. Adi loves a great conversation about ideas, passions and philosophy and is always looking to have dinner with new people!

Austin Martin

Austin is a Junior and native of San Diego, California concentrating in Business, Entrepreneurship & Organizations here at Brown. He has a deep personal mission to innovate, and use his creativity to ensure equal opportunity for minority males across the United States. With this guiding mission in mind, in 2014 he founded and created Rhymes with Reason: an interactive online educational platform (targeting minority males) that teaches academic vocabulary using popular hip-hop music.

Jackson Crook

Jackson is a junior studying Computer Science and Linguistics. In his free time, Jackson enjoys writing and playing music, binge-learning foreign languages, and looking for wisdom in pre-agricultural ways of life.

Julia Xu

Julia is a believer in the revolutionary power of social entrepreneurship. As a Junior at Brown University studying Business-Econ & Sociology, she founded Tink Knit, a social venture now run by 50 Brown and RISD students helping low-income single mothers in our community to make a substantial income through knitting, selling the knitted goods at the Brown Bookstore and returning all profits back to the mothers. She is passionate about creating sustainable social change through an ongoing opportunity that leads to self-empowerment, and believes that every student can be a changemaker, creating positive impact and transforming lives around them.

Julmar Carcedo

Julmar comes to Brown University from the Mindanao region of the Philippines. Despite growing up in a small town isolated from the rest of the world, he dreamed of a life bigger than himself. He grew up with amidst domestic violence, constant financial challenges, and discrimination for being gay but that didn’t stop him to chase his dreams relentlessly. His enduring spirit led him to an international scholarship to finish high school in Hong Kong and then to Brown. He believes that life is largely consisted of null moments in between significant events. During those null moments, he induces happiness in his life through journaling.

Kate Storey-Fisher

Kate is a senior at Brown concentrating in physics. She wants to pursue research in computational cosmology and share her passion for trying to understand the universe with the world. She integrates her nerdy interests with writing, as an editor for both a science-inspired literary journal and the campus blog. When she’s not solving physics problems or coding, you can find her eating her way across her hometown of San Francisco, hiking and making (arguably bad) puns.

Macklin Fluehr

Macklin is an aspiring engineering designer in his third year at Brown. He has worked with various design teams at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design to immerse himself in multidisciplinary problem solving and human-centered design. Macklin is primarily interested in community development strategies that systematically empower community members to lead their own development. Macklin is pursuing an Independent Concentration in Engineering Design and is a member of the Sailing Team.

Matt Paknis

Matt has more than twenty years of experience offering talks, retreats, writings, and long-term performance improvement programs to help people in organizations better manage themselves, coach others, and lead team results. He helps clients remove barriers to improve outcomes and to increase satisfaction. Matt co-captained the 1979 Madison Dodgers who finished the season as the top ranked NJ high school football team despite being a relatively small, Group II, school. As its sole three-year starter, he never lost a high school football game. During his senior football season his mom died after an eight-year struggle with cancer. His team and its goal built community and resiliency. This motivates him to share these values with others.

Max Song

Max studied data science and diplomacy at Brown University. He is interested in expanding intercultural empathy through the latest technological tools. In his free time, he’s co-published a book on data science, worked for 4 different technology companies as a data scientist, built predictive models for FED CCAR Stress test, started the One Salon—an intellectual, emotional and experiential gathering devoted to human awakening in fourteen cities around the world. He was selected as a member of the inaugural Schwarzman Scholar program and is going to Tsinghua University to study politics, economics and diplomacy.

Prasanna Tadi

Prasanna, a medical graduate of Alluri Sitaram Raju Academy of Medical Sciences in Eluru India, comes to Brown University most recently from Columbia University Medical Center where he was a research assistant in the Department of Neurology. He coordinated four research study projects; three abstracts from these studies have been submitted. One of the literature reviews Prasanna conducted, which examined the effect of bariatric surgery on metabolic syndrome, was published in New England Journal of Medicine.