TEDxWorthing

Speakers

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

• Alastair Wallace

  Alastair Wallace, CEO of Brainfood Ltd, is a leadership expert, award-winning trainer, and brain injury survivor. He’s helped over 23,500 leaders across 20+ countries become more confident, connected and human in how they lead. But after a single missed step at Oxford Circus station shattered his skull (and his identity), Alastair had to learn to rebuild himself from the inside out. Alastair’s idea is simple but powerful: we don’t grow by bouncing back, we grow by falling forward. With six operations, a swimming cap aiding his recovery, and a now-fiancé (who met him with half a head), he’s ready to share his truth. His talk challenges how we see failure, resilience, and who we really are underneath the mask.

• Antoinette Daniel

  Antoinette Daniel is the Founder and Director of Just Helpers Cleaning Agency, a values-driven London-based business championing fair pay, dignity, and opportunity for everyone in the cleaning sector. She is an accidental anti-human-trafficing campaigner, ethical entrepreneur, and passionate advocate for community, belonging, and everyday acts of courage that build connection.

• Chris A Barton BSc

  Chris Barton is a Business Spiritual Success Strategist, Manifesting Coach, Physiotherapist, and Amazon best-selling author with over 25 years of experience helping people unlock their potential. He is the founder of Dare to Dream Coaching and creator of The Compass System, blending strategy, spirituality, and mindset to support meaningful transformation. Chris has worked with teenagers, CEOs, charities, CICs, and even world-record-breaking athletes. His award-winning approach has earned recognition across physiotherapy, holistic wellbeing, grief recovery, and spiritual coaching. Chris is dedicated to helping people strengthen self-belief, align vision with action, and turn their biggest limitations into possibilities.

• Daniel Murphy

  Daniel is a Sustainable Energy Engineer and Carpenter who has transformed waste into functional pieces of art and even a up-cycled tiny home. With a diverse career spanning hands on construction to renewable energy innovation, he has spent years proving that sustainable housing is not only possible, its practical. Passionate about upskilling the next generation, Daniel advocates for Centres of Excellence where experienced tradespeople can connect with aspiring engineers and creators to help them learn how to build the net-positive homes of the future. These are homes that generate more energy than they consume. Through his work, Daniel challenges the idea that we are in a ''housing crisis''. Instead he believes we are in a priorities crisis. A crisis that can be solved by valuing skills, sustainability and people who work with their hands.

• Dean de Aragón Spears

  Dean is a Geographer who advocates for leadership grounded in kindness and purpose. He has paused his corporate career to lead Sussex Bay, a large-scale nature recovery project spanning 100 miles of coastline and serving 1.7 million residents across the South Coast. With over 20 years of experience in education, sustainability, government, charity, and technology, Dean focuses on inclusion, impact, and partnership. He is passionate about connecting people, place, and nature, and champions community collaboration as a path to meaningful change. Alongside his professional work, Dean volunteers his time to support charities and community groups and is a quietly confident public speaker committed to fostering empathy and environmental stewardship.

• Edel Parsons

  Edel is a nurse with a deep passion for human rights and a firm belief in just and inclusive healthcare. Outside of work, she can usually be found cooking and sharing food with friends, singing, or walking the coast or the Downs with her family and beloved hound. She is committed to living life fully and intentionally.

• Francesca O'Connor

  Francesca O’Connor is a workplace culture and communication expert, and co-founder of HappyHQ. She helps organisations build environments where people feel respected, trusted, and able to do their best work. She works with agencies, global brands, and universities to support leaders and teams to communicate clearly, handle challenge well, and create psychological safety rather than fear. Francesca’s work focuses on the gap between the leaders we are taught to admire and the leadership we actually need. She helps people speak with presence (not performance), build trust, and influence without ego. Because who we reward shapes the culture we create.

• Melica Moshiri

  Melica Moshiri is the Founder of Skilltorch, a tech recruitment company partnering with AI businesses across North America and Europe to scale their executive, go-to-market, and technical teams. She was selected from over 80,000 applicants to be one of 18 candidates on BBC’s The Apprentice 2025, where she embraced new challenges and finished in week eight of the competition. After the pandemic, Melica noticed how remote work and digital life were changing the way we connect, inspiring her TEDx talk on how we can rehumanise humans and rebuild real connection in an increasingly tech-driven world.

• Nicci Parish

  Nicci Parish is a mum to two boys and the founder of a community interest company in Worthing that supports open and honest conversations about drugs. After losing her son Billy when he took a party drug, MDMA, that was too pure, Nicci realised how much things have changed since she grew up in the 1980s. She has since dedicated herself to turning her grief, and Billy’s memory, into positive social change.

• Padmasini Dayananda

  An award-winning tech leader, ranked among the UK’s Top 10 Diverse Leaders in Tech, Padmasini has led global social sustainability programmes across 40 countries. Today, as a growth advisor and impact coach, she empowers women to overcome self-limiting beliefs, reclaim their voice, shed their cloak of invisibility and thrive, not just survive.

• Steven Smith

  Steve Smith is a Grammy Award–winning musician with over three decades of experience as a performer, songwriter, producer, and mentor. As a founding member of Dirty Vegas, he earned a Grammy in 2003, achieved Platinum and Gold records worldwide, and toured extensively across the globe. In 2019, he contributed to the Grammy-winning hit “Feel It Still” by Portugal. The Man, which went multi-Platinum in more than 30 countries. Since 2017, Steve has been a full-time member of the iconic British band Squeeze, performing on world tours and sharing stages with artists from The Who to Hall & Oates. Alongside his performance career, he mentors emerging musicians through Help Musicians UK and holds a Master’s in Music Enterprise from Waterbear College, specialising in sustainable careers in music.