TEDxChicago

Speakers

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

• Cecile Chazot

  Director, the SPIn Lab | Julia Weertman Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University

  Prof. Cécile Chazot is the Julia Weertman Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, where she leads the Sustainable Polymer Innovation Laboratory (SPIn Lab). Her team reimagines how fibers, fabrics, and plastics are made, drawing on nature’s four billion years of materials engineering to create high-performing textiles without costing the earth. Cécile earned her Ph.D. from MIT and M.Sc. from Mines ParisTech. She also co-founded MICRO, a remote education program expanding undergraduate access to materials science research, reflecting her belief that who gets to do the science shapes what the science becomes. Her work in innovation, teaching, and mentorship has earned early-career awards from the Department of Energy and Department of Defense, as well as honors from the Materials Research Society.

• Clarissa Flores

  Founder & CEO, Level Sporting Club; Cultural Strategist in Sports, Hospitality & Community

  "Clarissa Flores is Chicago native, Whitney Young alum, and former Northwestern University basketball player who went on to compete overseas and for the Puerto Rican national team. Clarissa has spent more than two decades in hospitality, including her current role as Director of Operations for Tao Group Hospitality in Chicago. In 2026, she brought her two worlds together as Founder and CEO of Level Sporting Club, Wrigleyville's first women's sports bar, a two-level space steps from Wrigley Field where women's sports are the default, not the request. What began as pop-up watch parties around the city became a permanent home for a fandom that has been showing up for decades, backed by an ownership group built largely of former athletes and women with deep ties to sports. Her mission is simple and structural: prove that women's sports can anchor a business, and level the playing field by building the infrastructure the fans already earned."

• Derek Lee McPhatter

  Writer & Producer, Performing Arts, Film & Digital | Principal, Latz & Company

  "Derek Lee McPhatter builds narratives at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and technology, and invites communities to imagine forward together. A Creative Capital Awardee, Derek is a resident playwright alumnus of both Chicago Dramatists and National Black Theatre in NYC, and he has written five music-theater works for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. His acclaimed projects include water riot: a cyber punk rock opera, originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and recently presented to sold-out audiences at Harlem's Apollo Theater. His queer, Black, sci-fi music theater experience, Bring the Beat Back, has been produced in Chicago, NYC and Philadelphia. Across stage, screen, digital media, Derek's practice treats hope as a discipline: rehearsing the futures we seek, together and out loud, until they become buildable."

• Dr. Jessica Schleider

  Founding Director, Lab for Scalable Mental Health | Associate Professor of Medical Social Sciences, Pediatrics, and Psychology, Northwestern University

  Dr. Jessica Schleider asks a question the mental health system was never designed to answer: what if one session was enough to start? A clinical psychologist and intervention scientist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, she is Founding Director of the Lab for Scalable Mental Health, where her team develops and tests evidence-based single-session interventions designed to provide meaningful support to young people, especially those traditional systems never reach. Jessica earned her Ph.D. at Harvard and completed clinical training at Yale School of Medicine. Her research has secured more than $13.6 million in funding and earned honors including the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award and Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Healthcare. She is also the author of Little Treatments, Big Effects, bringing her science to anyone who has needed help sooner than the system could offer it.

• Dr. Omar Lateef

  President & CEO, Rush University System for Health and Rush University Medical Center

  Dr. Omar Lateef leads one of the country’s most recognized academic health systems with a conviction that a hospital’s job is not only to treat illness, but to confront the conditions that cause it. As President and CEO of Rush University System for Health and Rush University Medical Center, he has guided Rush to the nation’s top tier for quality and safety, including repeated recognition on the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals Honor Roll and for its commitment to health equity. A critical-care physician by training, Dr. Lateef rose from chief medical officer to system CEO, earning national attention for Rush’s COVID-19 response. Modern Healthcare has named him one of the 50 Most Influential Clinical Executives six times. His work asks a structural question: what would it take to close the gap in who gets the chance to be healthy—and who shows up to fix it?

• Dr. Tamar Gefen

  Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Translational Neuropsychology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; Neuropsychologist, Mesulam Institute for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease

  "Dr. Tamar Gefen studies people across the spectrum of aging who are rewriting our traditional assumptions about the aging human brain. As an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the renowned Mesulam Institute at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, she directs the Laboratory for Translational Neuropsychology and helps lead the Northwestern SuperAging Program, a quarter-century study of adults over 80 whose memory rivals that of people decades younger. Her work focuses on bridging pre and post-mortem findings in atypical trajectories of aging, ranging from neurodegenerative diseases to SuperAging. A 2023 Toffler Scholar whose research regularly reaches national audiences, Tamar approaches the brain with a rare blend of scientific rigor and human wonder, turning a population most of us overlook into an opportunity to question the inevitability of decline in old age."

• Gita Pullapilly

  Screenwriter, Film Director, and Producer

  Gita Pullapilly is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter, director, producer, and journalist who transforms truth into stories that move people. Her films have premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, earned Emmy recognition, landed on the Black List, and reached global audiences through projects including Queenpins, starring Kristen Bell, Vince Vaughn, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste. She currently writes and directs on Paramount+’s Tulsa King, starring Sylvester Stallone. A Guggenheim Fellow and Presidential Leadership Scholar, Gita earned her master’s from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Named one of Variety’s “10 Directors to Watch,” she was also the first filmmaker selected as a Fulbright Senior Scholar to Jordan. Across journalism, filmmaking, and global service, Gita explores resilience, purpose, and transformation—and how embracing our unique superpower can help us become the hero of our own story.

• Jeffery Beckham Jr.

  CEO, Chicago Scholars | CEO, REACH Pathways

  "Jeffery Beckham Jr. builds the infrastructure of opportunity that brilliant young people were never handed. As CEO of Chicago Scholars, one of the city's largest college and career access organizations, he leads work that has supported more than 7,500 first-generation and under-resourced students, generating over $740 million in merit aid since 2007. As CEO of REACH Pathways, an award-winning ed-tech platform serving 50,000 students reimagining career exploration, his team earned the Future of Work award at the 2023 SXSW Pitch competition and a 2024 Chicago Innovation Award. A 2024 to 2025 Obama Foundation USA Leader raised in Chicago's Auburn Gresham community, Jeffery stands at the intersection of education, technology, and community empowerment, designing systems with young people rather than for them. He is also an accomplished acrylic painter whose work explores identity, resilience, and hope, an artistic practice that, like his leadership, starts with who people actually are."

• Jessie Fuentes

  Alderperson, Chicago's 26th Ward; Housing Justice Advocate

  "Jessie Fuentes made history in 2023 as the first woman, the youngest person, and the first queer Latina elected to lead Chicago's 26th Ward, home to Humboldt Park and the heart of the city's Puerto Rican community. Born and raised in Humboldt Park, Jessie has been open about growing up as the daughter of an incarcerated parent in a family affected by substance use, and about the mentors and community programs that invested in her when systems would have written her off. Before taking office, she served as Director of Policy and Youth Advocacy at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and co-chair of the Puerto Rican Agenda, where she helped lead the effort that designated Humboldt Park an official Cultural District, protecting the neighborhood's culture and economic stability. In City Council, she champions affordable housing, public school investment, and a vision of public safety built on what communities need to be whole."

• Joshua Doss

  Senior Pollster & Political Strategist, HIT Strategies

  Joshua Doss believes the most underestimated force in American politics is the feeling of belonging. A Chicago native who began his career as a grassroots organizer in his hometown, Joshua is a senior pollster and political strategist at HIT Strategies, where he leads research on Black voter behavior and economic narratives, translating public opinion into language that moves real people rather than just measuring them. His research has informed work for organizations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the NAACP, the Black Economic Alliance, and Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative, and his analysis has been featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Politico. Through his platform doss.discourse, Joshua brings polling data and electoral trends to over half a million followers, turning charts into conversations and making politics legible to people who were told it wasn't for them.

• Lawrence "Binkey" Tolefree

  Vibe Dealer & Community Leader | Creator of Art Therapy

  Lawrence ""Binkey"" Tolefree has spent his life proving that presence is a practice. A teaching artist, MC, host, beatboxer, and comedian from Chicago's South Side, Binkey is the creator of Art Therapy, a healing-centered creative gathering where Chicagoans of every generation come together to color, dance, mold clay, sing, and reset, a space to breathe and create without judgment that has grown from the city's open mic scene into a movement. Binkey's path has carried Chicago's creative spirit around the world, including years in Thailand teaching art and music to stateless children denied official identity, work rooted in the lesson of his own upbringing in a family that fostered, adopted, and made room for anyone who needed it. Back home, his impact is literally painted on the city: his portrait by muralist Rahmaan Statik stands in West Town, a tribute to a community stalwart whose medium has always been people.

• Manuela Zoninsein

  CEO & Co-Founder, Kadeya; Circular Supply Chain Architect

  Manuela Zoninsein doesn't believe people need to change; she believes systems do. As CEO and Co-Founder of Chicago-based Kadeya, she built the world's first closed-loop beverage vending system, a bottling plant, dishwasher, and soda fountain in a single machine that vends a drink in a reusable bottle, takes the empty back, and sanitizes it for the next person. The mission: make reuse so frictionless that single-use becomes the inconvenient option. A serial climate entrepreneur, Manuela previously launched two agritech ventures, including Brazil's largest online marketplace for smallholder farmers, and led international business development at Palantir Technologies. Her conviction was forged watching China shift from reuse to single-use at massive scale, and sharpened at MIT Sloan, where she earned her MBA. Kadeya's work has been honored with a Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award and featured by Forbes and CBS, one washed, refilled, returned bottle at a time.

• Pat Tomasulo

  Sports Anchor, WGN Morning News; Comedian; Founder, Laugh Your Face Off; Executive Trustee, The Facial Pain Research Foundation

  Pat Tomasulo has spent two decades making Chicago laugh, and he has turned that gift into a movement. The longtime sports anchor on WGN Morning News, a headlining stand-up comedian, and the creator and host of the late-night-style show Man of the People, Pat is one of the city's most recognizable media personalities and comedic voices, with an hour-long special, What a Time to Be Alive, to his name. His most personal work began with love. When his wife, Amy, was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, a rare and excruciating facial pain condition often called the ""suicide disease,"" Pat founded Laugh Your Face Off, an annual comedy benefit that has raised more than $5.5 million toward new treatments. As an Executive Trustee of The Facial Pain Research Foundation, he tells a story that holds love and exhaustion, laughter and hope in the same hands, the complicated, devoted truth of being a caregiver.

• Susan Stokes

  Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago; Director, Chicago Center on Democracy

  Susan Stokes has spent her career studying a question that has never felt more urgent: how democracies erode, and how citizens can repair them. She is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and founding Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy, and a leading scholar of democratic theory and political behavior. The author of six books, her latest, The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies (2025), examines the wave of democratic backsliding reaching the United States and offers a roadmap for resisting and rebuilding. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and President of the American Political Science Association, Susan brings rigorous social science to a timely conviction: democracy is not self-sustaining; people must choose it, and keep choosing it, together.

• Thackston Lundy

  Vice President of Workforce Pathways, National Louis University; Founder, Accelerate U

  Thackston Lundy is rebuilding the pathway to stable careers and college degrees for Americans who can’t access traditional higher education. As Vice President of Workforce Pathways at National Louis University, he founded and leads Accelerate U, a roughly six-month, Pell Grant-eligible, fully accredited program that moves learners into living-wage careers first and toward a college degree second, with as little as $0 out of pocket for those who qualify. With nearly two decades in education and workforce development, Thackston earned his B.A. from UNC-Chapel Hill and Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School. Since launching Accelerate U in 2021, his team has helped over 1,000 learners enter in-demand fields including healthcare and IT, with completers reporting average earnings gains of roughly $13,000—proof of his belief that this is a design problem we can solve, not a people problem.