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Kelly Benoit-Bird
Associate Professor, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University
Kelly Benoit-Bird applies acoustics to the study of ecosystems in the open ocean. She has helped develop several new optical and acoustical instruments and has made fundamental acoustical measurements of species ranging from zooplankton to fish, squid, and marine mammals. Benoit-Bird has been named a MacArthur Fellow, has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and has published in Nature, Marine Biology and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Through her research into how predators target their prey, Benoit-Bird is creating a new understanding of key ecological processes in the ocean.
Flaminia Catteruccia
Associate Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard School of Public Health
Flaminia Catteruccia is a molecular entomologist specializing in the reproductive biology of Anopheles mosquitoes, the only mosquitoes capable of transmitting human malaria. Searching for a more effective way to reduce the incidence of malaria, Catteruccia is exploring how disruptions to the mosquito mating process could cause them not to successfully reproduce. Her work has received funding from the Wellcome Trust and has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Biotechnology and Malaria Journal. Her focus on the reproductive biology of mosquitoes seeks keys to fighting a disease that still affects hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Sriram Kosuri
Postdoctoral Fellow, Wyss Institute and Harvard Medical School
Sriram Kosuri is developing next-generation DNA synthesis technologies for use in bioengineering. Prior to his work at the Wyss Institute, Kosuri was the first employee at Joule Unlimited, a biofuel startup company working to develop fuels from sunlight using engineered microbes; and co-founded OpenWetWare, a website designed to share information in the biological sciences. He has authored several patents and patent applications related to both biofuels and DNA synthesis technologies, and has published in journals such as Nature Biotechnology and Molecular Systems Biology. The potential applications of the engineered biological products Kosuri is working on span realms from medicine to environment to energy and materials.
Thaddeus Pace
Assistant Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine
Thaddeus Pace explores endocrine and immune system changes in people who suffer from stress-related psychiatric illness or who have had adverse early life experiences. His investigations have highlighted the potential of compassion meditation and other complementary practices to help individuals exposed to trauma, including patients with PTSD and children in state foster care programs. Pace’s work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and has appeared in Neuroscience, The American Journal of Psychiatry and International Immunopharmacology. His research aims to contribute new approaches to the long-term health and well-being of children and adults in challenging circumstances.
David Rand
Assistant Professor, Psychology Department, Yale University
David Rand focuses on the evolution of human behavior, with a particular emphasis on cooperation, generosity and altruism. His approach combines empirical observations from behavioral experiments with predictions generated by evolutionary game theoretic math models and computer simulations. Rand has been named to Wired magazine’s Smart List 2012 of “50 people who will change the world” as well as the AAAS/Science Program for Excellence in Science, and his work has been featured on the front covers of both Nature and Science and reported widely in the media. Rand seeks answers to why people are willing to help others at a cost to themselves, and what can be done to help solve social dilemmas when they arise.
Giuseppe Raviola
Director of Mental Health at Partners In Health, Director of the Program in Mental Health and Social Change at Harvard Medical School, and Medical Director of Patient Safety and Quality at Children's Hospital Boston
Giuseppe “Bepi” Raviola works to more fully integrate mental health services into global health care efforts. Through research, clinical practice and training in places ranging from Haiti to Rwanda, Raviola is building teams and bridging disciplines to address this critical and previously neglected issue. His ideas and findings have appeared in The Lancet, the Harvard Review of Psychiatry and the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Raviola’s work on behalf of local mental health team leaders aims to build lasting, community-based systems of mental health care.
John Rinn
Assistant Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University and Medical School and Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute
John Rinn takes an unconventional approach to the way biologists think about the human genome. Focusing on large intervening non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs), his work suggests that so-called “junk genes” may actually play a key regulatory role in cell function. Rinn’s finding have been published in Nature, Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and he has been named to Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10.” By identifying thousands of new RNA genes in the human genome, he is working toward a better understanding of their importance for human health and disease.
Leila Takayama
Research Scientist, Willow Garage
Leila Takayama studies how people perceive, understand, feel about and interact with robots. What can robots do? Better yet, what should they do, and how? Takayama has been collaborating with character animators, sound designers, and product designers to work toward making both the appearance and behaviors of robots more human-readable, approachable, and appealing. Her findings have appeared in the International Journal of Design, Neural Networks and IEEE Pervasive Computing. Through her research, Takayama is leading the way toward robots that serve their purposes more effectively and intuitively.
Tiffani Williams
Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University
Tiffani Williams explores new ways to use computation in helping to reconstruct the phylogenetic ways that all organisms are connected. A specialist in bioinformatics and high-performance computing, she is working with a multidisciplinary team to build the Open Tree of Life, showing the previously established links among species and providing tools for scientists to update and revise the tree as new data come in. She has been a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, has been funded by the National Science Foundation, and has published in Science, Evolutionary Bioinformatics and the Journal of Computational Biology. By helping identify how species are related to each other, Williams is providing a framework for new understanding in realms such as ecological health, environmental change, and human disease.
Benjamin Zaitchik
Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University
Benjamin Zaitchik’s research is directed at understanding, managing, and coping with climatic and hydrologic variability. He looks for new approaches to controlling human influences on climate and water resources at local, regional and global scales, and explores improved forecast systems and methods of risk assessment. His work has received funding from NASA, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, and appeared in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and Water Resources Research, among others. Zaitchik is interested in helping provide new insights in such crucial areas as transboundary water management, climate-informed disease early warning systems, and adaptation strategies in subsistence agricultural communities.
FELLOWS
Jamila Abass – MFarm
As CEO of MFarm, Jamila Abass uses mobile technology to help farmers increase their incomes. MFarm provides farmers in Kenya with real-time market price information and a group selling platform where they can connect with other farmers to jointly market their crops in greater volumes. By giving rural farmers more direct and powerful access to buyers, MFarm is positioned to improve hundreds of thousands - and potentially millions - of lives.
Lukas Biewald – CrowdFlower
Lukas Biewald is CEO and founder of CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing internet company that breaks large digital projects into small microtasks and distributes them to workers around the world. CrowdFlower engages a workforce of nearly 3.5 million people to complete more than 2 million tasks every day. In a key example, Biewald helped PopTech Science Fellow Sarah Fortune find new ways to study the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. By sharing the workload, making it fun and insisting on quality results, CrowdFlower provides incomes while speeding the path toward more accurate and scalable results.
Rachel Brown – Sisi ni Amani - Kenya
Rachel Brown founded Sisi ni Amani - Kenya ("We are Peace - Kenya" in Swahili) to pioneer the use of mobile technology to get the right communication capacity into the hands of local peacebuilders, enabling communities to participate in democratic processes and prevent violence. Through civic education, engagement and dialogue, SNA-K leverages SMS text messaging to support the peace efforts of community leaders. As a key partner in the collaborative PeaceTXT project, SNA-K is working to make locally effective tools that can be replicated globally in stopping violence and building peace.
Bryan Doerries – Outside the Wire
Bryan Doerries is the founder of Theater of War, a project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members, veterans, caregivers and families to help them start talking about the challenges faced by military communities today. He is also the co-founder of Outside the Wire, LLC, a social impact company that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end of life care, prison reform, political violence and torture, and the de-stigmatization of the treatment of substance abuse and addiction. A self-described evangelist for classical literature and its relevance to our lives today, Doerries uses age-old approaches to help heal very modern wounds.
Toure McCluskey – OkCopay
Toure McCluskey is the founder of OkCopay, a unique search engine for medical procedures that helps Americans with inadequate insurance find affordable local health care. At OkCopay, people can quickly search for the procedure they need, compare local providers, and view actual provider prices and details on the appropriate health clinic. By bringing transparency to healthcare costs, OkCopay is ensuring that those most in need can find effective and reasonable health services.
Nicholas Merrill – Calyx Institute
Nicholas Merrill created the Calyx Institute to help launch a telecommunications and Internet service provider focused on the right to privacy and freedom of expression. Merrill has personally fought intrusive government demands for private customer information, and he aims to develop, document and publicly release technology to enable private communications that even the service provider cannot decode or eavesdrop upon. Merrill’s goal is to inhibit mass surveillance and to protect the privacy and security of users everywhere.
www.facebook.com/calyxinstitute
Jacobo Quintanilla – Internews
Jacobo Quintanilla joined Internews to bring news and information resources to people in humanitarian crises. As Director of Humanitarian Information Projects, Quintanilla has helped create a two-way dialogue between aid workers and affected communities in countries such as Haiti, Central African Republic and Kenya. Building on Internews' core mission, Quintanilla's projects empower local media in crisis situations to give people the news and information they need, the ability to connect, and the means to make their voices heard.
Andreas Raptopoulos – Matternet
Andreas Raptopoulos is the founder and CEO of Matternet, building a network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to transport medicine and goods in places with poor road infrastructure. Matternet's "drones for good" use small, electric UAVs to transport packages weighing up to 2 kilos and containing items like vaccines, medicines or blood samples, over distances of 10 kilometers at a time. By creating a new paradigm for transportation that leapfrogs roads, Matternet is helping to revolutionize transportation in the developing world.
Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan – Global Financial Inclusion Initiative
As director of the Global Financial Inclusion Initiative at Yale University and Innovations for Poverty Action, Aishwarya Ratan focuses on the design and delivery of effective financial services for the poor. GFII seeks to test, evaluate and replicate interventions to improve products, delivery channels and tools ranging from savings products to mobile money and financial literacy programs. The initiative's rigorous approach to testing and measuring the impact of such innovations aims to ensure that the financial services available to the poor to manage and grow their money are affordable, efficient, secure and welfare-enhancing.
www.poverty-action.org/financialinclusion
Eric Stowe – A Child’s Right / Splash
Eric Stowe believes that every child has a right to clean water—and he has built an innovative, scalable approach to act on that belief. Since founding A Child's Right (soon to be Splash) in 2006, Stowe has developed a highly effective model to ensure safe water for urban children living at the intersection of these two streets: “greatest degrees of poverty” and “worst water quality conditions.” Leveraging world-class water purification technology, sustainable monitoring and maintenance, excellent people, and a rigorous commitment to transparency, A Child's Right will soon announce that every orphanage in China has safe drinking water. Stowe's team will then demonstrate how they are customizing their approach for 15 more countries in Asia and East Africa, using their "Proving It" platform to share both successes and failures at all of their project sites.
Eric Woods – Switchboard
Eric Woods is the CEO and founder of Switchboard, which uses mobile phones to create nationwide networks of health workers in developing countries. Switchboard partners with mobile operators to provide health workers with free nationwide calling, a nationwide registry and access to information via bulk text messaging. Having already linked all doctors in both Ghana and Liberia, Switchboard will next connect health workers at all levels throughout Tanzania, working toward the vision of a collaborative network of health advice, referrals and improved care in places where access is most challenging.
Daniel Zoughbie – Microclinic International
Daniel Zoughbie created Microclinic International to help leverage the power of social network relationships to spread healthy behaviors throughout under-resourced communities. Working in Jordan, India, Kenya, the West Bank and the United States, Microclinic International has begun to show that working through existing social groups of friends and family can significantly help people improve their outcomes in the fight against such diseases as diabetes and HIV/AIDS. The effectiveness of their approach is attracting attention from governments and other large-scale health providers, opening the door to large-scale replication and the broader use of this "contagious health" approach.
Alyson Warhurst, CEO and founder of Maplecroft, maps risks. She explained, “Charts and figures can be used to tell a story to predict risk in the future and intervene, engage policy change to shape the future growth environment and prevent disaster.” Among other things, she’s mapped corruption, human rights, child labor, and the HIV/AIDS rates of truck drivers in Africa. She shared a few key findings that have come from her mapping work: Economies rich in natural resources are more resilient to economic crises; when risks conflate, resilience multiplies; and the risk profiles of emerging economies that are fast-growing are steadily improving.
Alyson is CEO and founder of risk analysis and mapping company Maplecroft. Coming from an academic background, Warhurst now advises global companies and organizations at the board level on issues including global and political risks, human rights, ethical supply chains, corporate reputation and responsibility. She is a consultant to the World Economic Forum and has, for many years, been part of the faculty; she is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative and on the Board of Trustees at Transparency International UK.
In every seatback on every airliner from every country throughout the world, there it is: the laminated safety card. Yes, these colorful works of universal illustration all answer the same basic questions -- Where’s that life vest? How does the oxygen mask work? Where’s the closest exit? -- but every plane and every airline has its own unique system of graphic shorthand to communicate quickly and across language barriers.
With origins in the nautical safety, the art and craft of designing infographics for airline passengers had to swiftly evolve to cover new territory – namely, potential death in a fiery crash after severe aeronautical trauma.
Broadcast on IT Conversations, Ze Frank kicks off day two of Pop!Tech with his unique style and in-depth exploration of the mysterious culture surrounding of airline safety cards.
By tapping into an underground network of people who collect these cards, he analyzes examples from the early days of air travel to the extremely graphic graphics on Azerbijani Air.
Ze makes sure you'll never look at your personal floatation device the same way again! He walks us through the logic and logistics of communicating such a complex and unnerving scenario, giving us a glimpse at the awkward design decisions and harrowing storyboards confronting passengers around the world.
One topic not covered in the safety card: What to do after the life raft drifts off to sea, into the sunset, into this mad, mad world we live in.
Ze Frank is a brilliant performance artist, humorist, filmmaker, and web designer. He generally defies description - but check out www.zefrank.com to get a sense of his extraordinary talents.
More Pop!Tech art by Peter Durand of Alphachimp Studio Inc. at: www.alphachimp.com/poptech-art/
Margrét Pála gave a no-nonsense, impassioned and entertaining talk about the Hjalli method, the approach she’s taken to children’s education for 22 years. This specific approach includes sex-segregated classes, natural play material instead of conventional toys and a long-forgotten belief in discipline as a way in training social skills. In addition to providing details about Hjalli, as well as her own upbringing, Pala described how the 2008 “economic change,” as she called it, made her feel like “We reclaimed our own Iceland.” When it comes to the financial crisis and its impact on the 2,000 children she teaches, she explained, “My greatest fear is that children will not have a chance because of lack of adversity. We need adversity to be the best people we can be.”
Ólafsdóttir graduated from the Icelandic College of Education in 1981 as a preschool teacher after working for a few years as an unqualified preschool teacher. After graduation Pála was employed at a Reykjavík daycare center and a year later, in 1982, she became a director of the preschool Steinahlíð. She began developing the basics of the pedagogy that later was named the Hjalli method at that school. In 1989 Pála became the director of a new preschool in Hafnarfjörður called Hjalli. She continued developing rather unusual pedagogical methods such as sex-segregated classes, natural play material instead of conventional toys and a long forgotten belief in discipline as a way in training social skills.
Architect Mohammed Rezwan is the founder of Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, a not-for-profit development organization in Bangladesh. Drawing on his architectural expertise, he designs spaces on boats that successfully accommodate the needs of schools, libraries, and training and healthcare centers.
Mohammed Rezwan builds floating schools in flood-prone Bangladesh. After realizing that schools in these areas with the heaviest rain are flooded 3-4 months per year, and that the students can’t attend during that time, he began to build solar-powered classrooms so that kids can continue their educations--no matter what.
This model has been replicated for floating health clinics and training centers to teach farmers sustainable farming methods. While there are about fifty boats in operation now that have impacted the lives of about 90,000 people, within the year he hopes to have over 100 functioning boat. “The future floats,” Rezwan concluded.
Dr. Amin has a vision for the future of energy infrastructure in North America – smarter, sustainable, more resilient and secure. We’ve learned a great deal in the last 15 years about complex “lifeline” infrastructures – not just powerlines, but anything that absolutely, positively needs to survive failure.
From the PopTech Blog:
Amin’s work went on to studying intelligent transport and highway systems. This work was moved dramatically forwards by EPRI – the Electric Power Research Institute – which involved 240 graduate students and 108 professors who jointly studied complex interactive networks. The goal was to build networks that were secure, robust and self-healing.
“The mother of smart grids is the self-healing grid.” These systems have a normal, undisturbed state, an alert model that senses precursors to an emergency state, and then attempts to restore from these aggravated states to the normal ones. The key is to build systems that are simple and smart, that focus on security, reliability, robustness, efficiency, and security. Security became even more important in the wake of 9/11, when the focus became on dynamic risk assessment, analyzing threats to these infrastructures.
More at www.alphachimp.com/poptech-art/2010/6/23/massoud-amin-sma...
Adam Magyar is a photographer. He uses high-tech digital tools and cameras adapted from industrial applications to examine the human existence through a machine eye. His images look into and challenge our identities as individuals in the urban crowd. He lives in Berlin.
Clara Miller is an amazing woman with an enormous amount of knowledge on non-profit funding and equity. Unfortunately for her, her laptop crashed this morning, so we had to improvises for the Pop!Tech Fellows program.
Eric and myself became 2 bars in her bar chart.
When I told Sarah Fortune that Skye asked me to say hello to her, she invited me to bring Skye to her lab at Harvard. Booya!
The PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellows are high-potential early- and mid-career scientists working in areas of critical importance to the nation and the planet. They represent a corps of highly visible and socially engaged scientific leaders who embody science as an essential way of thinking, discovering, understanding and deciding.
Photography by John Santerre
(If you'd like to use any of these photos for anything pls contact Kris Krüg first - kriskrug@gmail.com or 778. 898. 3076. Thank you! (c) (r) (tm) 2016)
Every October in our hometown of Camden, Maine, we bring together 600 diverse thinkers and doers from around the world to share ideas and projects that are shaping the future. The PopTech conference, a gathering for “real thinkers” (WIRED), marks your entry into the extensive PopTech community — a mix of highly motivated and curious speakers, PopTech Fellows, and other participants. Whether it’s in the Camden Opera House listening to presenters and performers, at breakout discussions, workshops, randomly assigned lunches, happy hours or parties, you’ll form lasting connections with influencers and individuals working at the forefront of their fields. All while spending several fun days in a place Forbes calls one of “America’s Prettiest Towns.”
So, whether you’re coming to just enjoy the eclectic and original program, make new connections, find potential collaborators, or all of the above, there’s a place for you at PopTech.
(If you'd like to use any of these photos for anything pls contact Kris Krüg first - kriskrug@gmail.com or 778. 898. 3076. Thank you! (c) (r) (tm) 2016)
Every October in our hometown of Camden, Maine, we bring together 600 diverse thinkers and doers from around the world to share ideas and projects that are shaping the future. The PopTech conference, a gathering for “real thinkers” (WIRED), marks your entry into the extensive PopTech community — a mix of highly motivated and curious speakers, PopTech Fellows, and other participants. Whether it’s in the Camden Opera House listening to presenters and performers, at breakout discussions, workshops, randomly assigned lunches, happy hours or parties, you’ll form lasting connections with influencers and individuals working at the forefront of their fields. All while spending several fun days in a place Forbes calls one of “America’s Prettiest Towns.”
So, whether you’re coming to just enjoy the eclectic and original program, make new connections, find potential collaborators, or all of the above, there’s a place for you at PopTech.
First lady of Iceland, Dorrit Moussaieff, watches her husband, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, present at PopTech.
Joy Reidenberg, PhD is a professor of Anatomy and Functional Morphology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, is a fast-talking, energetic anatomist who captivated the PopTech audience with her talk, “Why Whales are Weird.” With one amazing fact after the next (Whales evolved from deer-like creatures! Their spinal movement is more like galloping in the water! They don’t actually spout water! They have mustaches!), she took us through the story of evolution using whales as a mode. She explained that evolution is the process to mediate resilience and thus, survival.
As a biomedical research scientist, Reidenberg studies the comparative anatomy of the mammalian head and neck. She has examined a large variety of animals ranging from insects to humans, but her particular fascination is with aquatic animals. Much of Reidenberg’s recent work is focused on how animals adapt to environmental extremes. Current research is centered around the anatomy of whales, dolphins and porpoises, where she's working to understand how they produce sounds and withstand the pressures of diving.
Silja Bára Ómarsdóttir was one of 25 people who helped rewrite the Icelandic constitution. She took the PopTech stage to explain how the citizens of Iceland responded after the banks collapsed in 2008, protesting politely outside of Parliament to a louder, angrier outcry, which the government eventually acknowledged. The government then suggested that Iceland's citizens should rewrite the constitution to understand who the Icelandic people really were, especially since the Danish had originally written the constitution. Ómarsdóttir explained the process by which those 25 elected citizens broke up into committees and, with considerable public input, worked for four months to overhaul the constitution.
Silja is adjunct lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Iceland. Her current research is focused on Icelandic foreign and security policy. She completed a BA, with honors, in international affairs from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon and an MA in international relations from the University of Southern California, as well as a graduate diploma in methodology from the University of Iceland. She is a women’s rights activist and has served on the boards of the Icelandic Feminist Association, the Icelandic Women’s Rights Association, the UNIFEM National Committee in Iceland, and the Icelandic Gender Equality Council.
Kári Stefánsson, M.D., Dr. Med. founded deCODE in August 1996. Stefánsson was previously a professor of Neurology, Neuropathology and Neuroscience at Harvard University and Director of Neuropathology at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. From 1983 to 1993, he held faculty positions in Neurology, Neuropathology and Neurosciences at the University of Chicago. Stefánsson received his M.D. and Dr. Med. from the University of Iceland and is board-certified in neurology and neuropathology in the United States. Stefansson is recognized as a leading figure in human genetics.
Retired Army Brigadier General Loree Sutton, MD is a psychiatrist whose culminating military assignment involved serving as the Founding Director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE) from 2007 to 2010. Committed to empowering others, Sutton has more than 25 years of leadership experience encompassing a diverse mix of domains: civilian and military; combat and peacekeeping; command and staff; clinical and academic; organizational design and development; transmedia strategic communications; public policy; global health; education, technology and training.
Laurie Leitch, PhD has been a clinical trainer, researcher and organizational consultant for over 25 years. She is the co-founder of Threshold GlobalWorks (TGW) and Trauma Resource Institute (TRI). She has co-developed models of intervention that provide stabilization skills training in neuroscience-based trauma programs appropriate with complex trauma and for use with adults and children suffering from long-term and acute trauma as well as war-zone trauma.