TEDxTehran

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check the event website for the latest lineup.

• Christopher Patrick Peterka

  Entrepreneur & Futurist

  Christopher Peterka (38) from Cologne, Germany considers himself a human being, a father of two and a futurist entrepreneur. Since 1996 he has founded ten companies. Three are still active and profitable businesses today. His real interest lies in the global interplay of men-machine and nature in a fully digitized world. To find out about it he has travelled 53 countries and interviewed more than 1200 decision makers for the last 15 years.

• Ehsan Jahandarpour

  Growth Hacker

  Ehsan Jahandarpour, a globally recognized growth hacker, and startup coach were born in 1982 in Shiraz. While he helped companies like Microsoft, PETRONAS, and other big players, Ehsan had worked on crafting a new, practical, plug and play framework that enables businesses of all size, and startups to plug into their business and grow faster. In 2016, Forbes magazine has ranked Ehsan among the top 20 growth hackers in the world. Ehsan also contributes to prestigious magazines like Entrepreneur Magazine (US, and Spain), Business.com, Asia Times, and many more. He recently established the growth hacking center in Iran to bring the knowledge of growth hacking to Iran's eco-system, help companies grow smarter, and also give back to the community.

• Farid Shokrieh

  Entrepreneur that Never Stopped Being a Teacher

  Farid Shokrieh is the Managing Director of an advertising agency that went from a start-up company in 2008 to a grown-up SME by 2017. Before co-founding this company, Farid studied and practiced teaching methodologies and was an educational advisor and teacher trainer besides teaching himself. He only later understood to what extent this background had shaped his management style, and that as a Managing Director, he essentially never stopped being a teacher. Once he understood this, he started to consciously apply educational methods in a business environment and witnessed results that he shared in his talk. As the world is changing fast, and in particular Iranian business culture changes even faster, he discusses how the needs of a new global generation are not fulfilled with classic organizational culture and bureaucracy, and how methods derived from teaching can bring the drastic changes that need to be applied in leadership and management.

• Hamidreza Keshavarz Mohammadian

  Artificial Intelligence Expert

  Hamidreza Keshavarz was born in Tehran in 1983. He attended the Allameh Helli school (NODET) where he later became a teacher and head of the department. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from Tarbiat Modares University. His main interest areas are data science and artificial intelligence and his thesis, entitled “Sentiment analysis based on the extraction of lexicon features” is about opinion mining on social media. He has published 12 papers and is a reviewer for international journals and conferences. He was awarded for presenting his thesis in the countrywide “Presenting your thesis in three minutes” competition. He has been in love with computers since early childhood when computers were not as widespread as today. His love with computers was intensified when he started programming at age 11. He wrote a Paintbrush program in the Assembly language at age 12, which cemented his desire to become active in this field.

• Kiarash Aramesh

  Healthcare Ethics & Community Medicine Expert

  Kiarash Aramesh is a Scholar in Residence at the Center for Healthcare Ethics at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and an Associate Professor at the Medical Ethics and History of Medicine at Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS). He is a medical doctor and holds a specialty in community medicine and a Ph.D. in healthcare ethics. He has previously worked as a visiting scholar at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Hastings Center in the USA. He has served as a member of various committees, including the Specialized Research Ethics Committee of TUMS and the National Committee of Ethics in Science and Technology and Bioethics at the National Commission of UNESCO in Iran.

• Mohammad Kazem Ghanbari

  Entrepreneur

  "Mohammad Kazem Ghanbari was born in 1970, he holds a BA in computer engineering from Sharif University and a master in MBA from Industrial management institute. He was a part of Iranian companies like Iran System, Data Processing Iran(DPI), Safineh and Procom Technology for almost 10 years and now he manages his own company Ghasedak Samaneh for two decades. He was one of the first Iran internet users and he turned Safineh company to a pioneer ISP in Iran and then he found Ghasedak Samaneh to use his experience for solving problems of other ISPs in Iran by creating and presenting comprehensive solutions for them. Since 1989 he had an active role in some national projects and Since 1999, the CEO of Ghasedak Samaneh has been working on providing key solutions for TELECOM companies. He was honored in 2010 as the “competent Director of Informatics” in Iran.

• Paniez Paykari

  Cosmologist

  Dr Paniez Paykari, born in London in 1982, is a cosmologist who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) at University College London (UCL). She spent her childhood in Iran & fascinated by the cosmos from a young age, she knew by the age of 10 that she wanted to study astrophysics and never doubted that choice in her life. She received her Diploma in Mathematics in Iran in 1999 and moved to London for higher education. She received her M.Sci. (Master of Science) degree in Astrophysics from University College London (UCL) in 2006. She then moved to the Imperial College London for her Ph.D. degree in Cosmology, which she completed in 2009. Paniez then moved to France in 2010 to start her first postdoctoral position at Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA). She was a Planck Scientist while at CEA — Planck is a telescope sent into space in 2009 to take pictures of our baby Universe when it was only 400,000 years old.

• Reza Sayah

  Journalist and Reporter

  Reza Sayah is a journalist and filmmaker based in Tehran. For the past 20 years, Reza has reported for international news organizations including CNN, Al Jazeera, and France 24. Most recently, Sayah reported on this year’s Iranian presidential elections for American news network PBS. In 2008, he helped launch CNN’s bureau in Islamabad, Pakistan where for the next five years he reported on the country’s ongoing political turmoil, the government campaign against the Taliban, and the search for Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. In 2013, Sayah moved to Cairo, Egypt where he covered the crisis that followed the Egyptian revolution, the uprising that toppled former president Mohammad Morsy, and the election of current president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. Sayah has also covered the conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Prior to working for CNN, he spent more than ten years reporting for major news networks in the United States.

• Shahrzad Ensemble

  String Quartet

  Shahrzad Ensemble was founded in 2011 by good friends Tina Jamehgarmi & Negar Norad. After the success of their first album, “To the Earth and the Sun” -- which was based on ensemble works of "Mohammad Saeed Sharifian" -- Shahrzad Ensemble collaborated with renowned musicians such as “Shahrdad Rohani”, "Kiawasch Sahebaassagh" and "Karen Keyhani". In the summer of 2017, after collaborating with international musicians such as "Yann Merker" and "Yegor Shevtsov" and several performances at the Fajr Musical Festival, Shahrzad Ensemble, alongside "Homayoun Shajarian" and "Sohrab Pournazeri" participated in “C Project” one of the most important post-revolution multimedia events in Iran.