TEDx Palo Alto Salon presents The New Renaissance

Redefining 
Work – Art – Medicine –
Learning and Purpose

Join us for an inspiring afternoon at TEDxPaloAlto Salon as we explore The New Renaissance: Redefining Work, Learning, Medicine, Expression, and Purpose. Through solo talks, and engaging discussions, this event examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping human potential—while also highlighting the domains that remain uniquely human. We’ll hear from scientists, technologists, doctors, educators, and musicians sharing their perspectives on this transformative era. 

Get Tickets

Schedule:

June 8, 2025:

Time: Event begins at 2:30 PM

Agenda

2:30-4:00 PM Session one 
4:00-4:30 PM Coffee, Pastries and Networking break
4:30- 6:00 PM Session Two
6:00 PM Event Ends

Ticket price:
General Admission  $75 
Student Admission $50 (Discounted rate for students with valid ID)

We appreciate the support from our Sponsors. You may want to look at their services.

Speaker: Lisa Gevelber

Lisa Gevelber founded Grow with Google – Google’s $1 billion commitment to economic opportunity. Since 2017, Grow with Google has helped over 100 million people worldwide grow their skills, careers, and businesses. One of her most significant contributions is the Google Career Certificates, which have helped over one million people globally upskill from low wage work to well paying jobs. Lisa’s current focus is helping tens of millions of people learn to use AI.

Lisa also leads Google for Startups globally and has been the Chief Marketing Officer for the Americas Region at Google since 2010. In this role she leads Marketing for products including Google Search, YouTube, Android, and Google Ads as well as Google’s Brand and Reputation efforts.

In 2022, Lisa was named to the inaugural Forbes Future Of Work 50, honoring leaders whose impact, reach and creativity has the potential to affect millions of workers.

Speaker: Adam Dorsay

Dr. Adam Dorsay is a licensed psychologist and executive coach in Silicon Valley, working with high-achieving adults, including professionals, executives, entrepreneurs, and professional athletes. Adam is the host of SuperPsyched, an award-winning podcast with over 250 episodes. He has given two highly regarded TEDx Talks: one about men and emotions and the other about friendship in adulthood. He’s the author of an International Impact Award-winning book Super Psyched: Unleash the Power of the 4 Types of Connection and Live the Life You Love.

Beyond his private practice, Adam is a resiliency expert who co-created an international program for Facebook’s Online Safety employees for several years. He now serves as the resiliency consultant to DigitalOcean and has frequent requests from the media for interviews. He has provided keynotes and trainings to multiple corporations and organizations, including Microsoft, Linkedin, and the California Psychological Association.

He is happily married and the father of two sons.

Speaker: Sarah Fox

Sarah Fox serves as the Assistant Head of School for Academics at Charles Armstrong School, where she has dedicated her career to transforming education for students who learn differently.

Her journey at Armstrong began as a 4th grade homeroom teacher, where she spent four formative years developing innovative classroom strategies. Sarah's exceptional ability to connect research with practice led to her advancement through several leadership roles—from Instructional Coach to Director of Curriculum and Instruction, then to Lower School Director and Director of Research, before assuming her current position.

With a deep commitment to evidence-based methodologies, Sarah bridges the gap between educational research and classroom implementation. Her approach combines rigorous academic frameworks with compassionate, student-centered teaching practices that honor diverse learning styles. Throughout her career, she has remained focused on a singular mission: empowering students who learn differently to discover their unique strengths and achieve their full potential.

Speaker: Sara Krzyzaniak

Dr. Sara Krzyzaniak is an emergency physician at Stanford with nearly two decades of experience. In addition to caring for patients, she leads the emergency medicine residency program, teaches medical students and residents, and conducts research on gender equity, struggling learners, and innovative approaches to teaching and assessment. She values the breadth of a career in academic medicine, but the moments that have shaped her most profoundly are those at the bedside: holding space for patients and families during life’s most vulnerable, uncertain, and often heartbreaking moments.

Speaker: Danny Clay

Danny Clay is a composer and music educator whose work is deeply rooted in play, curiosity, collaboration, and the sheer joy of creating community experiences with people of all ages and artistic backgrounds. He sees “composing” as the act of putting sounds together, and strives to find ways to utilize this act to foster creativity and connection – whether it be conducting musical games with visitors to Chicago’s Millennium Park, making experimental audio installations with students at Stanford University, or building orchestras of recycled instruments with his elementary schoolers at Alta Vista School in San Francisco.

Recent collaborations outside the classroom include a work for Kronos Quartet with members of the Academy for Teachers, interactive children’s programs with the Santa Rosa Symphony and St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and instructional videos on composing for Kennedy Center Education. His current interests lie in developing games that explore sound and creativity through interactive music-making.

Speaker: Frank Rohde

Frank Rohde is the founder of Ownify, a platform created to tackle the growing challenge of housing affordability. By rethinking traditional ownership models, Ownify offers a new path for first-time homebuyers through fractional homeownership—lowering financial barriers by combining shared equity with smarter, AI-driven credit and income assessments.

Before launching Ownify, Frank led Nomis Solutions, where he helped transform how mortgages are priced globally. With a track record as a three-time fintech founder, his work bridges data science, real estate, and financial inclusion. Frank began his career at Oliver Wyman and FICO and holds a degree in finance and real estate from Wharton.

Speaker: Matthew Gasda

Matthew Gasda is a playwright, director, and novelist based in New York City and the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research. His work explores the emotional and intellectual undercurrents of contemporary life, examining themes of identity, performance, desire, and cultural decay through ensemble casts and stylized dialogue. Known for his commitment to independent theater and DIY production, Gasda has written and staged numerous plays—including Dimes Square, Berlin Story, Ardor, Zoomers, Doomers, and Soonest Mended (that have attracted devoted followings for their incisive wit, philosophical depth, and naturalistic staging). His plays are often set in spaces of social tension (apartments, bars, dinner parties) where intimacy and conflict unfold simultaneously.

In addition to his theatrical work, Gasda is the author of several novels, including The Sleepers, and numerous essays. He is deeply engaged with the intersections of aesthetics, history, and thought, and his writing reflects a reverence for classical forms fused with a distinctly modern sensibility. Gasda's work has been compared to that of Eric Rohmer, Richard Linklater, and Wallace Shawn, but his voice remains unmistakably his own: raw, searching, and alert to the beauty and absurdity of everyday life.

Speaker: Molly Miller

Molly Miller is a Los Angeles-based guitarist, composer, and educator whose career has unfolded with a natural sense of purpose and curiosity. Known for her versatility and expressive playing, Molly is the leader of the acclaimed Molly Miller Trio and a first-call session and touring guitarist. She has performed and recorded with renowned artists including Jason Mraz, the Black Eyed Peas, and Zayn Malik, showcasing her ability to effortlessly move between genres.

A graduate of the University of Southern California, Molly earned her Doctorate of Musical Arts in Guitar Performance and now serves on the faculty at USC’s Thornton School of Music. Her career spans global tours and performances at iconic venues such as The Hollywood Bowl, Royal Albert Hall, and Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

Molly seamlessly balances a dynamic career that includes studio work, touring, leading her trio, and mentoring the next generation of musicians. Her artistry and unique voice on the guitar have been recognized in major publications including Fresh Air, LA Weekly, Guitar World, Guitar Player, Fretboard Journal, Vintage Guitar, Premier Guitar, and The Village Voice.

Speaker: Brandon Lee

Brandon Lee is the Middle School Director at Charles Armstrong School, a Bay Area institution serving students in grades 2–8 with dyslexia and language-based learning differences. With over 15 years of experience in education, Brandon has developed a unique expertise at the intersection of language development, inclusive learning, and innovative pedagogy. His career began in Deaf education and dual-language schools, later evolving to focus on project-based learning and interdisciplinary teaching practices. At Charles Armstrong, Brandon leads with a belief that education is the great equalizer — a tool to empower students for the future they are growing into, not just the world they see today.

Speaker: Isobel McCrum

Isobel McCrum is a language engineer and historian investigating the moral and material consequences of large language models—both in product development and at large. At Microsoft, she works at the intersection of ethics, design, and engineering, developing tools and frameworks to better understand model behavior and safeguard the integrity of human cognition in generative systems. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges language patterns, technical architecture, and responsible innovation. As a co-founder of Folly Productions, Isobel also explores these questions through story-telling, confronting the cultural and psychological tension generative technology provokes. Using narrative to generate conversation, Isobel’s creative work embraces ambiguity, asking audiences what it means to be human in an era shaped by transhumanist possibility.

Speaker: Srinija Srinivasan

Born in India and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Srinija Srinivasan has followed a lifelong curiosity about consciousness, wondering from a young age what possibilities can arise from believing divinity is in ourselves and all around us.  She studied artificial intelligence at Stanford and then worked at the Cyc Project, a large-scale AI effort to build an immense database of commonsense knowledge.

In 1995, she joined Yahoo! as their fifth employee and self-titled Ontological Yahoo, where she continued over 15 years as Vice President, Editor-in-Chief.  She simultaneously chaired the board of non-profit SFJAZZ, leading her to co-found Loove, a Brooklyn-based music venture exploring how commerce and technology can be guided by artistic values rather than letting our culture be led by market values.

She has recently cofounded Jubilee College, a two-year school in Dunsmuir, CA where students will be equally rooted in physical work, rigorous liberal arts study, and contemplative practice.

Srinija is a board member of the On Being Project and a former vice chair of Stanford University's Board of Trustees.  She lives in Palo Alto, CA and Brooklyn, NY.

Speaker: Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas, PhD

Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas is a cognitive neuroscientist and Assistant Professor at UCSF’s Department of Neurology - Memory and Aging Center - where he directs the NeuroAI Lab at the intersection of human cognition and artificial intelligence. His research explores the foundations of intelligence—how our brains represent symbols, numbers, and language—and how these uniquely human abilities develop and sometimes falter with age or disease. Using advanced computational methods and neuroimaging, Pedro’s current projects include building AI-driven technologies for earlier, more accurate diagnosis of neurological disorders; voice agents to streamline data collection and clinical care; and systems harnessing large-scale medical datasets to accelerate discovery. Originally from Brazil, Pedro studied at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, received his PhD from Sorbonne University in Paris, and completed postdoctoral research at Stanford. Outside the lab, he is an ultrarunner and photographer, passionate about exploring both the mind and the world around us.

Speaker: Yobie Benjamin

Yobie Benjamin is an AI architect and venture investor who has worked on artificial intelligence implementations across various industries. Recognized as a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, he co-founded Token.io, which helped develop Open Banking innovation used by 80 UK and European banks serving 210 million users. During his time as Global CTO at Citibank, he contributed to the technological infrastructure supporting Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Benjamin focuses on exploring practical and technical approaches to AI safety while developing beneficial applications. His experimental projects include AI tools for analyzing dog health through movement patterns trained on thousands of videos, and systems for assessing skin health combining image processing, skin and gut microbiome analysis. Through his writings and essays, he shares perspectives on responsible AI development and brings unique insights to enterprises navigating complex AI deployments and risk mitigation. He volunteers as Digital Innovation Advisor to the UN's World Food Programme and serves on the California Healthcare Facilities Funding Authority Board. Drawing from decades of hands-on experience solving enterprise-scale AI challenges, he helps organizations balance innovation with safety in their AI implementations.

Speaker: Andrey Sushko

Andrey Sushko is a hands-on engineer with a physics background who sees his career as identifying what the laws of physics allow, and then finding the right arrangement of matter to achieve that end. His passion, though, is finding where the 'letter' of said laws diverges from common interpretations of their 'spirit', and then exploiting those loopholes to push the boundary of what is possible.

While completing an experimental physics PhD at Harvard as a Hertz Fellow, Andrey returned to a project he had started as a Stanford undergrad, co-founding WindBorne Systems to tackle weather forecasting by filling the global atmospheric data gap with long-duration balloons. As CTO at WindBorne, his overall focus remains consistent: taking exciting ideas from the realm of physical possibility into reality by building an exceptional team and doing a lot of weird engineering.

Speaker: Janice Chen

Janice Chen is the co-founder and CTO of Mammoth Biosciences, a biotechnology company based in the San Francisco Bay Area that is harnessing the diversity of nature to develop in vivo gene editing therapies. Through its discovery of novel CRISPR systems, the company is enabling the full potential of its platform to read and write the code of life. Janice received her PhD from the lab of Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna at University of California, Berkeley, where she investigated mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas proteins and is an inventor of several CRISPR-based technologies. Janice's work has been recognized by several organizations, including Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare, Endpoints Top 20 Women in Biopharma, and MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35.

Speaker: Julia Doscher

Julia Doscher is the Math and Science Specialist and STEM Team Lead at Khan Lab School, where she has spent the past eight years leading innovative approaches to STEM education. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Biology from Florida State University and completed a year of service with AmeriCorps at an educational nonprofit. Julia creates classroom environments where student voice, choice, and mastery-based learning are central. As a teacher and team lead, she develops curriculum and advocates for high expectations that empower students to exceed age-based assumptions about academic ability. Julia coaches Girls’ Adventures in Math and Math Olympiads teams, supporting students in building both confidence and competence in math. Her work reflects a belief that all students thrive when challenged, supported, and encouraged to lead their own learning journey.

Speaker: Marilu Gorno Tempini

Marilu Gorno Tempini, MD, PhD, is a behavioral neurologist and the Charles Schwab Distinguished Professor in Dyslexia and Neurodevelopment at the University of California, San Francisco. She directs the Language Neurobiology Lab, the UCSF Dyslexia Center and the Multitudes Universal Screening Project. Her clinical and research work focuses on speech and language disorders in children with neurodevelopmental differences and adults with neurodegenerative conditions. The aim of her program is to improve screening, diagnosis, and care for individuals living with language and behavioral challenges, as well as to enhance our understanding of the cognitive and brain mechanisms underlying oral and written language abilities in diverse populations.

Master of Ceremonies: Connie Yang

Connie Yang is a design leader turned artist and creative connector, bringing heart, humor, and curiosity to everything she does. Her career began at the forefront of the tech world—shaping early products at Facebook, serving as a Design Director at Stripe, and leading design at Coinbase. But over time, her focus shifted from building digital experiences to exploring the human experience behind creativity.

Today, Connie channels her energy into podcasting, public speaking, and interviewing as an expressive art form. She hosts a show on modern friendship, uplifts local artist communities, and writes poetry that reflects the wonder of everyday life.

Driven by a passion for uncovering magic and sharing collective wisdom, Connie thrives at the intersection of storytelling, connection, and creative exploration. As MC of TEDxPaloAlto, she brings her love of ideas—and the people behind them—to the stage with warmth and intention.