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TED Announces 2009 Prize Winners

The Technology, Entertainment and Design conference has announced the next three winners of its annual TED prize. The winners of the 2009 prize are: oceanographer Sylvia Earle, astronomer Jill Cornell Tarter, and former economist and trained musician Jose Antonio Abreu. Earle served as chief scientist for the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration in the early […]

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The Technology, Entertainment and Design conference has announced the next three winners of its annual TED prize.

The winners of the 2009 prize are: oceanographer Sylvia Earle, astronomer Jill Cornell Tarter, and former economist and trained musician Jose Antonio Abreu.

Earle served as chief scientist for the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration in the early 1990s and is co-founder of Deep Ocean Engineering and Deep Ocean Technologies, which design and build deep ocean vehicles for underwater exploration.

Tarter is director of the SETI Institute's Center for SETI Research, which focuses on searching for sentient extra-terrestrials.

Abreu is founder of El Sistema, the world-renowned music education program that has brought classical music training to more than 200,000 impoverished Venezuelan children and teens. Conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who has been tapped to become the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was trained under El Sistema.

The annual TED prize awards winners $100,000 and one wish that will "change the world." Each year recipients unveil their wish to attendees at the TED conference, who then set about trying to help the prize winner make the wish come true.

Past recipients of the prize included U2 musician Bono, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and infectious disease specialist Dr. Larry Brilliant.

The TED conference will be celebrating its 25th year when it convenes February 3-8, 2009, in Long Beach, California, where it will move for the first time from its previous Monterey, California location. The elite conference gathers leaders in technology, entertainment and design to cross-pollinate ideas and gain inspiration from presentations on the latest developments in sciences and the arts. The conference attracts a wide range of people, from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to former Vice President Al Gore, musician Peter Gabriel and filmmaker J.J. Abrams.

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