TEDxYouth@AISD

Speakers

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

• Abyad Zaman

  Sustainability & Systems Thinking

  Abyad spent a long time doing what most high schoolers do — watching productivity videos, setting goals, running on motivation until it ran out, and wondering why discipline seemed to come so naturally to everyone else. The turning point wasn't a new video or a better morning routine. It was a realization: motivation is like rain, it comes and goes, but a well-designed system flows regardless of the weather. From stacking multiple app blockers so he'd physically have to think before opening YouTube, to redesigning his environment so that the path of least resistance led toward the things that actually mattered, Abyad stopped trying to be a different person and started building better conditions for the person he already was. His talk makes the case that the real lever isn't willpower — it's design. And that the first system worth building is the one that shapes how you move through every single day.

• Alex Moo

  Psychology

  Alex's talk was born from a very familiar failure — the New Year's resolution that lasts eleven days. He noticed that the harder his family committed to eating perfectly, the more spectacularly they'd eventually end up surrounded by junk food in the garage. That pattern, he realized, wasn't a character flaw. It was a design flaw. When we chase perfection absolutely, we set ourselves up for a fall worse than where we started. Alex's argument is disarmingly simple: imperfection isn't the obstacle to growth, it's the condition for it. And when we extend that same grace to the people around us — allowing them to be flawed too — something shifts. Collaboration becomes honest, mistakes become information, and the future we're trying to build together actually has a foundation that can hold.

• Arib Malik

  A high school freshman, amateur stock investor and coder.

  Arib has always been drawn to the architecture of financial systems — not just how markets work, but how they fail. Growing up watching headlines celebrate economic growth while quietly glossing over the structural cracks underneath, he became fascinated by the question that rarely gets asked until it's too late: what happens when the risk no one is watching suddenly becomes everyone's problem? His talk draws on the anatomy of the 2008 financial crisis — the leverage, the opacity, the mispriced confidence — and holds it up against the private equity landscape of today. Arib isn't here to sound an alarm or dismiss the concerns as noise. He's here to give the audience the tools to think clearly for themselves, because a resilient financial tomorrow, he believes, starts with shared awareness long before the crisis arrives.

• Elijah Frost

  Politics

  As democratic backsliding intensifies globally, Elijah makes an optimistic case: Gen Z can raise the bar through informed voting and civic accountability — not cynicism. An active MUN participant with a deep interest in political systems and governance, Elijah brings a non-partisan perspective to the stage, building a call to steward democracy on the conviction that with great power comes great responsibility.

• Joonho Lee

  Basketball and Life

  Joonho Lee Joonho has always been quietly fascinated by something most people take for granted — the moment trust breaks. He noticed it first in the smaller world of high school: how quickly a relationship could fracture, and how much harder it was to rebuild than anyone expected. That curiosity pulled him toward the psychology and science behind it, and what he found surprised him. Trust isn't just an emotional phenomenon — it's a structural one, with patterns, conditions, and predictable points of failure. His talk unpacks how trust is actually built, what makes it so fragile, and why protecting it might be the single most important investment we make in each other. Because any version of tomorrow we try to build together, he argues, collapses without it.

• Masrur Mehadi

  Student (Sophomore)

  Masrur's interests have always gravitated toward the gap between what numbers say and what people feel. Growing up in Bangladesh, he watched his family's 110-megawatt solar power plant in Khulna redefine what "progress" could look like for an entire community, not just on a balance sheet, but in daily lives. That experience planted a deeper question: if a country's GDP is rising, why does so much still feel left behind? His initiative, Empower Solar, was built on exactly that tension, running sustainability workshops for underprivileged children not just to talk about energy, but to show that real development only means something when it reaches the people most often excluded from it. This year, Masrur brings that same lens to the TEDx stage, challenging us to rethink what success actually looks like for Bangladesh and beyond — because tomorrow, he argues, can only be built when progress is shared, felt, and experienced together.

• Nabiha Hoque

  8th Grade student

  Nabiha was born into a world where the math stopped adding up — and she wanted to know why. As a child of Gen Alpha, she grew up hearing that a single income once bought a house, a car, three kids, and a dog in the suburbs, and found herself wondering what exactly had changed between then and now. That question sent her back through history: through FDR's New Deal and its social safety nets, through the Reagan era's embrace of trickle-down economics, and through the slow unwinding of wages, housing security, and worker protections that followed. Her talk connects those dots clearly and without flinching, pushing back against the impulse to blame immigrants or minorities for a crisis with a much longer paper trail. Nabiha doesn't just want the audience to understand what happened — she wants them to feel motivated enough to do something about it, because the together in tomorrow, she argues, has to be fought for.

• Talha Kabir

  Finance

  Talha has watched Bangladesh's economy transform in real time — from the garment factories that built its industrial backbone to the smartphones now sitting in the hands of young entrepreneurs running businesses out of their bedrooms. What excites him isn't the technology itself, but what it makes possible: a future where geography, capital, and background no longer decide who gets to participate in economic life. His talk traces Bangladesh's digital commerce revolution from bazaars to browsers, spotlighting the students, small sellers, and rural communities quietly rewriting the rules of who gets to build wealth. For Talha, e-commerce isn't just a business trend — it's one of the most concrete answers available right now to the question of how we build a tomorrow that actually belongs to everyone.

• Tanzim Redwan

  Student Researcher and Public Health

  I’m a student researcher and youth entrepreneur passionate about turning ideas into impact. My work spans public health, AI, and youth empowerment—ranging from publishing in a Springer Q2 journal on adolescent malnutrition to founding MAANUSH, a nonprofit educating underserved children, and Project Q2, a platform mentoring young researchers. As a Global Health Leaders Scholar (Johns Hopkins, 2025) and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Undergraduate Microbiology Society, I thrive at the intersection of research, innovation, and communication. Whether through Olympiads, startups, or public speaking, my mission is to democratize health and education while building ventures that scale globally.