An Ecuadorian neuroscientist, Indian investigative journalist and Chilean astrobiologist are among this year’s cohort of TED Fellows, announced today.
Each year the programme, founded in 2009, selects innovators from the arts, sciences and startup sectors, along with activists, inventors and more, to showcase their creations and their knowledge at the annual TED conference and become part of its prestigious community. To date, 414 Fellows have been chosen from 87 countries, and this year’s candidates are proving just as diverse.
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TED Fellows founder and director Tom Rielly said: “What do a gut-brain neurobiologist, a Chinese entrepreneur innovating in food delivery and an investigative journalist reporting on authoritarian regimes in the Central African Republic have in common? As it turns out, a whole lot. We are thrilled to welcome our newest class of TED Fellows, an incredible group of exceptional achievers with exemplary character.”
The Fellowship programme is much like WIRED’s own Innovation Fellowship, which over the years has seen rocket engineers and digital artists join the fold. The 2017 TED Fellows include: Anjan Sundaram, an author who reports on ongoing dictatorships and acts of discrimination across the globe, from Rwanda to India; Diego Bohorquez, an Ecuadorian neuroscientist who is investigating the links between the brain and the gut and how these can potentially shed light on disorders such as Parkinson’s and autism; Rebecca Brachman, cofounder of a biotech startup looking at developing drugs that prevent mental illness and stress; Damon Davis, whose documentary Whose Streets charts the 2014 events in Ferguson, Missouri and will be premiered at the Sundance festival in Utah this month; and Matilda Ho, the founder of China’s first food-tech accelerator.
Along with the 15 TED Fellows announced today, all of whom will deliver talks at the TED conference in Vancouver this April, ten Senior Fellows were selected from among past picks. “Our Fellows tell us that the biggest benefit of the program is the other Fellows themselves - the mutual support, professional and personal, and the deep, lasting connections,” said Rielly. “The collaborative spirit of the program yields a powerful network where each person profoundly influences each other, and the group as a whole functions as a supercomputer to which each fellow has personal access.”
This year’s Senior Fellows include computational biologist Laura Boykin, who is using genomics and supercomputing to help farmers in sub-Saharan Africa fight off crop-destroying viruses; Amanda Nguyen, a founder of nonprofit Rise, which is helping implement a Sexual Assault Survivor Bill of Rights in the US; and Andrew Pelling, a Canadian scientist using everything from Lego to apples to create a new generation of medical innovations.
This year, members of the general public would need a mere $17,000 to be able to become part of the TED community and attend the Vancouver conference in April as a 'donor' - the 'standard' $8,500 tickets are already sold out.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
