TEDxUNCCharlotte 2020 speakers to address ‘Thinking Future. Thinking Forward’

In its second year, TEDxUNCCharlotte will host 14 speakers during the University’s independently organized TEDx event on Friday, March 27. Live talks will center on the theme, “Thinking Future. Thinking Forward.”

Speakers include UNC Charlotte undergraduate students Octavio Lopez, who will talk about social media as a religion; Connor Wood, who will address student housing costs and housing insecurity; Maggie Brown, who will talk about how intelligence is viewed; and doctoral students Margaret Kocherga, whose talk will feature her story as the dancing scientist; and Brittany Danielle Hunt, who will discuss Native culture in the South and disrupting the black and white racial binary.

University faculty and staff members participating are Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, software and information systems professor in the College of Computing and Informatics, who will speak on user interfaces and making technology bilingual; Colby Ford ’14, ’15 M.S., ‘18 Ph.D., a researcher in the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, who will talk about new science fields and offer ways students can explain their work to their parents who think they deal with robots; Diana Rowan, professor in the School of Social Work, who will speak on debunking the bootstrap myth (climbing the economic ladder is more than hard work); Doug Shoemaker, director of research and outreach for the Center for Applied Geographic Information Science, who will speak on the future of architecture, urbanization and sustainability; Fatma Mili, dean of the College of Computing and Informatics, who will discuss computing democracy and ethics; and David Goldfield, the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History, who will speak on the current political environment and solutions moving forward.

Speakers also include University alumna Darian Cuffee ‘19, who will discuss black eccentricity and Afro-quirk culture; and community members Frank Moore, who will speak on postpartum depression in men, and Ashley Rivenbark, who will explore the role of inclusion in innovation.

Tickets for this year’s event in the Cone University Center will go on sale in February.