Pop!Tech - Speakers and Performers 2008

Chris Anderson

As editor in chief, Chris Anderson has led Wired magazine to six National Magazine Award nominations, winning awards for General Excellence in 2005 and 2007. In April 2007, he was named to the Time 100—Time magazine’s list of the 100 men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world
An internationally known speaker and widely read blogger, Chris is the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, and blogs regularly about the subject at thelongtail.com. His upcoming book, Free explores the socio-economic implications of companies that give away products and services for free. In the 20th century, free was a marketing trick, but in the 21st century, Chris proposes free is becoming a new economic model.

Chris is also the father of five who finds time to regularly nurture his passion of DIY drones and who blogs at geekdad.com. He is an officer of the Young Presidents’ Association and a regular speaker and participant at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Stephen Badylak

More than 20 years ago, while looking for ways to make substitute blood vessels, Stephen Badylak and his colleagues discovered the most unlikely of wound healers—small intestine material from pigs. What he calls “Mother Nature's scaffold for wound healing," has since proven valuable in a wide variety of healing issues—from minimizing scarring to healing torn tendons.

Stephen holds more than 200 patents worldwide and has authored more than 180 scientific publications. He is currently president elect of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society and has chaired several study sections for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including the Bioengineering, Technology, and Surgical Sciences Study Section.

Stephen has received numerous awards, including the Sigma Xi Scientific Society 2002 Research Award, the Clemson Award (Society for Biomaterials) in 2005, the Carnegie Science Center Award for Excellence in 2005 and 2008 and the Chancellors Distinguished Research Award in 2008.

Marian Bantjes

Admirers say that Marian Bantjes can set a mean page of type—a deliberate understatement—as the ornamental, obsessively detailed text Bantjes puts to paper is nothing short of pure art. Whether drawn in pen and pencil or crafted from sugar, the serifs and shapes flow together in perfect harmony, resembling lace or an illuminated manuscript.

A Canadian-born designer, artist, illustrator, typographer and writer, Marian’s clients include WIRED and Saks Fifth Avenue, and her designs have been featured in magazines published from Brazil to Paris. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper-Hewitt). She is currently an instructor at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“I can be inspired at any moment by the strangest things,” Marian says. “I am seldom bored. I have more ideas than I will ever be able to produce in my lifetime—some of them are even good ideas.”

Bill Bishop

Think back to the car rides of your youth and you’ll likely hear the refrain “This is my side, that’s your side. Don’t cross the line or I’ll tell dad.” This stay-on-your-own-side mentality has crept into the ways that as adults we organize ourselves socially, economically, politically … and geographically. Bill Bishop has something to say about it.

In his book, The Big Sort, Bill goes beyond the simplistic red state/blue state divide to examine the way Americans have sorted themselves into like-minded communities over the last three decades. He delves into the causes and consequences of this behavior.

Bill is an accomplished journalist who has written for The Mountain Eagle, Lexington Herald-Leader and American-Statesman in addition to owning and operating The Bastrop County Times and co-editing The Daily Yonder.

Chandler Burr

As perfume critic for The New York Times, Chandler Burr reviews the latest scents, speaks on the global stage and leads interactive classes explaining perfume to the average person.

Beyond his responsibilities at the Times, Chandler writes on politics, business, travel, food and sexual orientation. His latest book is The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York. He has served as contributing editor for U.S. News and World Report and has written two other books. His stage play, Exquisite, was nominated for the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, and his first novel, You or Someone Like You, will be released by Ecco Press in summer 2009.

Of the style he brings to perfume writing, Chandler states, “I'm a science journalist … and I depart from a sort of relentlessly clinical, empirical approach upward toward the aesthetics of perfume.”

Dickson Despommier

Dickson Despommier believes vertical farms, also called “farmscrapers,” could provide a sustainable solution for feeding the world’s growing population and repairing ecosystems damaged by traditional farming methods. Imagine if the building in which you lived provided all the fruit, vegetables, fish and livestock you needed to eat during the year. Thanks to Dickson and his graduate students at Columbia University’s Environmental Health Sciences lab, drawings for such a building already exist.

Equal parts microbiologist, ecologist and agricultural architect, Dickson uses greenhouse techniques and recycled resources to envision buildings that could provide enough food for their residents while minimizing land use, water waste and the possibility of crop failures.

Dickson was named Teacher of the Year by the American Medical Students Association in 2003, and he has earned the same distinction six times at Columbia. He will be included in a major upcoming exhibit featuring ten great innovators at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

Kelly Dobson

A self-proclaimed junkyard kid, Kelly Dobson has marveled at the underlying connection between people and machines since the age of four. She is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she developed “machine therapy,” a personal, societal and psychoanalytical study of machine design and its pervasive effects on everyday life.

Kelly’s recent work includes a voice-controlled blender named Blendie, and ScreamBody (the first in a series of wearable body organs), which allows users to vocalize emotions in otherwise impermissible environments.

“Critical infoldings happen in the connections between people and machines,” Kelly says. “Machines have expressive, engaging behaviors, strength of character, negotiative egos and neurotic propensities.”

Krista Dong

Dr. Krista Dong is the director for a program called Integration of TB in Education and Care for HIV/AIDS (iTEACH) based in KwaZulu-Natal South Africa. She has worked in International Health focusing on HIV/AIDS and TB since 1991, from Gambia and South Africa to Indonesia. She is on faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) / Harvard Medical School where she completed her Infectious Disease Training. For several years, Krista helped hundreds of destitute HIV-positive adults and children in Durban, South Africa at the iThemba Family Care Center. As a founding physician, she developed a program that incorporated local beliefs, cultural practices and at-home visits into traditional HIV/AIDS treatments, making them more successful. The South African government is now replicating her programs in other provinces. Originally drawn to the AIDS crisis after the deaths of several friends during the early 1980s, Krista is interested in continuing her HIV work in developing countries.

“Once patients accept their illness and are empowered to understand it, then they can choose life,” she said in a recent interview.

Juan Enriquez

Juan Enriquez is a firm believer in the economic power of the human genome. As chairman and CEO of Biotechonomy LLC, a life sciences research and investment firm, he is literally invested in unlocking the intersection between science and industry. His global bestseller, As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth, demystifies genetics in an effort to bring the topic out of the lab and into the family dining room. By making genetics accessible, Juan thinks we can prepare for the new economy.

Juan is a prolific contributor to a wide variety of periodicals. His work for the Harvard Business School is often showcased in the Harvard Business Review. Fortune profiled him as “Mr. Gene,” and he was one of the organizers of the life sciences summit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA for Time.

Joining Craig Venter, who sequenced the human genome, Juan was part of an around-the-world sailing voyage that led to the discovery of an unprecedented number of new species.

“Today the most important language you can teach your kids is genetics,” Juan says. “Those who refuse to learn will be functionally illiterate and unable to understand, much less compete in, a rapidly changing economy.”

Robert Fabricant

Robert Fabricant is the creative director of frog design in New York, where he and his design teams develop user experiences for a wide range of digital platforms—from medical devices to desktop software. His client list is impressive, including AOL, GE, Coca-Cola, BBC, Nextel and more. He is a frequent contributor to a wide variety or publications, with interactive work appearing in Wired, The Wall Street Journal and I.D. magazine. He serves on the faculty of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. In 2009, he will join the faculty of the School of Visual Arts.

Robert is also a faculty member of the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellowship Program 2008. His work with the Pop!Tech Accelerator program provided the design services for Project Masiluleke, a mobile technology campaign that heightens public awareness of HIV/AIDS information, counseling and treatment, primarily in South Africa. Thanks to Robert, the project’s participants find a valuable, relevant experience.

“Virtual experiences have the potential to add a great deal of richness to our communications and imaginations,” Robert says.

Laurie Garrett

Laurie Garrett is a best-selling author, science journalist and the only writer to win all three of the “Big P” journalism awards: Peabody, Polk (twice) and Pulitzer.

A senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations since 2004, Laurie is an expert on global health, with a focus on emerging and re-emerging diseases, how they relate to public health, and their effects on foreign policy and national security. Her books, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, are considered required reading for anyone interested in getting a grasp on the global health crisis.

“We live in a microbial soup,” Laurie reminds us. “Humans have a hard time imagining that they are just one piece of a general ecology. And that, in fact, they are food for literally millions of microbes.”

Malcolm Gladwell

Three great things about Malcolm Gladwell:
1.    His award-winning writing for The New Yorker takes us places we’ve never dreamed of going and never want to leave.
2.    In 2000, his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference set the marketing world on its ear.
3.    In 2005, he defined the enormous human potential of the instantaneous and wrote Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking … he was then named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People.
4.    He has a new book due out in November.

Okay, that was four great things.

Malcolm graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.

Saul Griffith

Dr. Saul Griffith lives and breathes open-source information. He co-founded instructables.com, an online clearing house where you can share what you do and how you do it, from building low-cost indoor ponds to cooking mushroom burgers that look like mushrooms. He is also the co-founder of numerous other companies, including Squid Labs, Low Cost Eyeglasses, Potenco, and Makani Power.

Saul co-writes a series of comics devoted to making and doing called HowToons! He is a columnist for Craft and Make magazines, and serves as technical advisor to Popular Mechanics. He holds multiple patents and patents pending in textiles, optics, nanotechnology, and energy production.

Of Squid Labs, one of his many accomplishments, Saul says “We’re not a think tank, we’re a do tank.”

K. David Harrison

It is estimated that in this century, more than half of the world’s languages may disappear. As co-founder and director of research at the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, David Harrison leads language revitalization projects in an effort to preserve the dying and disappearing languages of the world. Working with National Geographic, he conducts scientific expeditions to map global linguistic diversity found in “language hotspots”. He is passionate about training indigenous community members to document and sustain their own languages.

David is an associate professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College and the author of the new book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. He was recently featured in the documentary The Linguists, which followed his hands-on linguistic fieldwork in Siberia, India and Bolivia.

David considers the preservation and revitalization of languages the “greatest conservation challenge of our time … the loss to science, to humanity and to the native communities themselves will be catastrophic.”

Laura Waters Hinson

Laura Waters Hinson is the director and executive producer of As We Forgive, the 2008 Student Academy Award-winning documentary about Rwanda’s reconciliation movement. As tens of thousands of Rwandans are released back into the very communities they once helped destroy, Laura’s film asks basic questions of forgiveness and recovery.

Currently, she is engaged in a nationwide screening tour, presenting As We Forgive for the U.S. Congress, the State Department, Library of Congress, the World Bank and various universities and institutions. To that end, she recently launched Living Bricks, a multi-media viewer campaign to support reconciliation efforts in Rwanda.

Laura also served on the crew of 14 Women, an acclaimed documentary about the lives of the female U.S. Senators, directed by Mary Lambert.
When speaking about her film, Laura says, “I believe As We Forgive has a message for people all over the world. Reconciliation is needed everywhere, and I’m convinced that we can all learn from Rwanda.”

Van Jones

Van Jones is a human rights and civil rights a