PopTech 2011 Speakers & Performers

Annmarie Ahearn, owner and chef of Salt Water Farm, is a recent New York City transplant whose experience in the food industry and culinary travels have culminated in a deep appreciation for traditional methods of cooking locally sourced ingredients.

Shahidul Alam is a photographer, writer, curator, and activist whose most recent book, My Journey As A Witness, is a lucid and personal account of the evolution of one of the most significant movements in contemporary photography, through the eyes and voice of the man who shaped it.

Saman Arbabi is the co-creator and executive producer of Parazit, a weekly half-hour Persian-language satirical television show broadcast on Voice of America's Persian service.

Ethan Berke, a researcher at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, studies spatial epidemiology, demonstrating the importance of the built environment in a populations's health.

Lukas Biewald is Chairman and a co-founder of CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing Internet company that breaks large digital projects into small tasks and distributes them to workers around the world.

Blitz the Ambassador is a Ghanian-born, New York-based MC, composer, and producer who combines a lightning-fast mind, the political boldness of Chuck D, and the sixth groove sense of Fela Kuti to unleash psychedelic Afrobeat colors and triple-time rhymes on his album Native Sun (Embassy MVMT).

Scott Z. Burns is the screenwriter of the film Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh, about what happens when a global pandemic strikes.

Marie-Hélène Carleton is a writer, photographer, and documentary filmmaker.

Jan Chipchase is Executive Creative Director of Global Design at frog design and a global design anthropologist.

Tanzeem Choudhury, 2010 PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellow, directs the People-Aware Computing group, which develops systems that can reason about human activities, interactions, and social networks in everyday environments, using information from mobile sensor data.

Bhagwan Chowdhry, Professor of Finance and Faculty Director of the Master of Financial Engineering program at UCLA Anderson, recently proposed a Financial Access at Birth (FAB) initiative in which every child born in the world is given an initial deposit of $100 in an online bank account to guarantee that everyone will have access to financial services in a few decades.

Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and is the author of A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.

Amy J.C. Cuddy is a social psychologist whose latest research illuminates how “faking” body postures that convey competence and power changes our testosterone and cortisol levels, increases our appetite for risk, and configures our brain to cope well in stressful situations.

The David Wax Museum fuses traditional Mexican folk with American roots and indie rock to create an utterly unique Mexo-Americana aesthetic. Combining Latin rhythms, call-and-response hollering, and donkey jawbone rattling, they have electrified audiences across the country and are “kicking up a cloud of excitement with their high-energy border-crossing sensibility” (The New Yorker).

David DeSteno is a psychologist and director of the Northeastern University Social Emotions Lab, which examines the mechanisms of the mind that shape social behavior.

Unity Dow, a lawyer, human rights activist, and writer from Botswana, was the first female high court judge in Botswana’s history and is the author with Max Essex of Saturday is for Funerals, an examination of the AIDS epidemic in Botswana.

Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design, has advanced the art and literature of presentations, emerging with her agency as one of the most sought-after authorities in presentation design.

Ladleah Dunn is the Farm Manager at Salt Water Farm, which offers its guests the opportunity to create local, seasonal fare while overlooking Maine's Penobscot Bay.

Aidan Dwyer, age 13, was one of twelve students to receive the 2011 Young Naturalist Award from the American Museum of Natural History in New York for creating an innovative approach to collecting sunlight in photovoltaic arrays.

eL Seed is a Tunisian artist, born in France, whose often monumental works are a mixture of street art and Arabic calligraphy..

Sarah Fortune, 2010 PopTech Science and Leadership Fellow, is an Assistant Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health where she studies the pathogenesis of tuberculosis.

Micah Garen is a writer, photographer and documentary filmmaker currently at work on three films, one from Iraq, one from Afghanistan, and one on the Egyptian revolution.

Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health on the Council on Foreign Relations, has been tracking outbreaks of previously unknown or rare viruses and bacteria for the past two decades.

Nils Gilman is an intellectual historian from the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Deviant Globalization, an anthology that explores how globalized black market economies are challenging traditional state authority.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist, designer and writer, interrogating emerging technology and science, and exploring the role of design in a biotech revolution through intensive research into synthetic biology.

Anand Giridharadas is an American-born writer whose first book, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking, is a work of narrative nonfiction about his return to the India that his parents left.

Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson is the fifth President of the Republic of Iceland.

Lane Greene is a business correspondent for The Economist, covering professional services, and the chief blogger for “Johnson,” The Economist’s blog on language.

Simon Hauger has a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Masters of Science in Instruction from Drexel University.

Shima'a Helmy, a human rights activist from Cairo, Egypt, participated in the 25th of January uprising since the first day and has been organizing for marches, demonstrations and events ever since.

Adriane Herman is a visual artist who investigates consumption through appropriated imagery and media ranging from archival to edible.

Erik Hersman, 2008 PopTech Social Innovation Fellow, is an innovator and technologist focused on advancing the use of technology as an empowerment tool in the developing world.

Kambiz Hosseini is a playwright, award-winning actor, and currently host and writer of Voice of America’s satirical TV program Parazit.

Matt Jones is a principal at BERG, a London-based design consultancy that works hands-on with companies to research and develop their technologies and strategy.

Daniel Kish, CEO of World Access for the Blind (and blind since he was one-year-old), can navigate his bike through traffic-filled streets of southern California, trek through the woods solo, or locate a building over a thousand feet away—all using a click of his tongue and a technique he calls FlashSonar.

Alison Klayman, a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker, began shooting her debut documentary feature, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, while living in China from 2006-2010.

Frederic Fol Leymarie, a professor of Computing, is the co-director and co-founder of the post-graduate program in Computer Games and Entertainment at Goldsmiths College.

Kathy LeMay, who began her global activism in war-torn Yugoslavia where she worked with women survivors of the siege and rape-genocide camps, has been a social change fundraiser for 15 years, raising more than $150 million dollars in the fields of women’s human rights, hunger and poverty relief, and movement-building.

Bernard Lietaer, author of The Future of Money (translated in 18 languages), is an international expert in the design and implementation of currency systems.

W. Ian Lipkin, M.D. is an internationally recognized authority on pathogens and the role of infection in neurologic and neuropsychiatric diseases.

Alexis Lloyd is a Creative Technologist in the Research and Development Lab at The New York Times, where she investigates technology trends and prototypes future interfaces for content delivery.

Reuben Margolin creates large-scale kinetic sculptures that use pulleys and motors to create the complex movements and structures we see in nature. He will present a new collaboration with Gideon Obarzanek at this year’s conference.

Milenko Matanovic is a community builder, visual artist, and a founding director of Pomegranate Center, an arena in which art, public participation, and community betterment converge.

Gale McCullough, a former nursery school teacher and old-fashioned naturalist, delighted the 2010 PopTech audience with the story of how she identified a whale that had journeyed an unprecedented 6,000 miles from Brazil to Madagascar by examining photographs on Flickr.

Capt. Wayne Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby are the authors of the groundbreaking “Mr. Y” article entitled “A National Strategic Narrative” which proposes that the United States must refocus its foreign policy priorities and invest less in overt militarization and more in education, development aid, and sustainability infrastructure.

Dava J. Newman, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is most notable for assisting NASA in developing new space activity suits, namely the Bio-Suit, which will provide pressure mechanically, rather than with pressurized gas.

Gideon Obarzanek is an Australian choreographer whose modern dance company Chunky Move dazzles audiences with its use of interactive sound and light technologies to create genre-defying dance performances. He will present a new collaboration with Reuben Margolin at this year’s conference.

Tony Orrico is a visual artist, performer, and choreographer whose Penwald Drawings are a series of bilateral drawings in which Tony explores the use of his body as a tool of measurement to inscribe geometries through movement and course.

Rajendra Pachauri is Chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific intergovernmental body that provides decision-makers and the public with an objective source of information about climate change.

Capt. Wayne Porter and Col. Mark Mykleby are the authors of the groundbreaking “Mr. Y” article entitled “A National Strategic Narrative” which proposes that the United States must refocus its foreign policy priorities and invest less in overt militarization and more in education, development aid, and sustainability infrastructure.

Jonathan Rothberg is best known for inventing high-speed, massively parallel DNA sequencing—an idea that came to him after his infant son was rushed to intensive care and he realized how critical individual genome sequencing was to human health.

Scott Saponas is a researcher in the Computational User Experiences group at Microsoft Research (MSR) in Redmond, WA.

Hayat Sindi is a co-founder and director of Diagnostics For All, a nonprofit fusing biotechnology and microfluidics, dedicated to creating low-cost, easy-to-use, point-of-care diagnostics designed specifically for the 60% of the developing world that lives beyond the reach of urban hospitals and medical infrastructures.

Vaishali Sinha is a co-director and producer of Made in India, an award-winning documentary feature about the human experiences behind the phenomena of "outsourcing" surrogate mothers to India—a growing international industry.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is one of the world’s most respected thought leaders in international relations. A former director of policy planning for the State Department, she has long argued for a values-based approach to foreign policy.

Arvind Subramanian, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and at the Center for Global Development, argues in his recent book, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance, that China has already become the most economically dominant country in the world in terms of wealth, trade, and finance.

Desney Tan, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, manages the Computational User Experiences group in Redmond, Washington as well as the Human-Computer Interaction group in Beijing, China.

Thomas Thwaites, a designer whose work examines how technology interacts with beliefs to shape our society, built a toaster completely from scratch (even going so far as sourcing his own crude oil to create homemade plastic) in his acclaimed Toaster Project.

Patrick Tresset, a French artist/scientist currently based in London, uses what he calls "clumsy robotics" to create autonomous cybernetic entities that are playful projections of the artist.

Reggie Watts returns to the PopTech stage to share his unique brand of “disinformation” and wry improvisational humor.

Zeb and Haniya are a singer-songwriter duo from Lahore, Pakistan whose debut album, Chup (Hush), broke to glowing reviews in Pakistan. Their music speaks to a shared base of human experience while evoking the rich and textured soundscapes of West Asia.

Michael Zimbalist is currently the vice president of research & development operations at The New York Times Company.