TEDxHSRW

Dr. Abdelrahman Rayan is a neuroscientist with a broad background spanning medicine, systems neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and mathematical modelling. His work explores how the brain reorganizes its activity as it moves between wakefulness and sleep, and how these changing brain states support memory consolidation. At Radboud University and Radboudumc in Nijmegen, he uses AI and machine learning to explore latent sleep states across species, linking animal and human sleep research to better understand how the brain reorganizes its activity during sleep. In his TEDx talk, Abdel challenges the popular myth that we use only 10% of our brain and uses it as a starting point to ask a deeper question: where does human potential really come from? His talk explores sleep not as a passive break from life, but as an active state in which the brain reorganizes experience, strengthens memories, processes emotions, and prepares us for the our next new experience.

Aleks Kireeva is a senior commercial operator who has spent fifteen years rebuilding operations at European fintechs and B2B SaaS companies. She currently leads Commercial Analytics for a €1.5 billion vertical at Delivery Hero, after earlier roles at Billie, Smava, and Neugelb, Commerzbank's digital subsidiary. Her thesis is that companies aren't machines, even though we keep designing them like they are. The constraints that look permanent inside organisations: the queues, the silos, the rules everyone has accepted as "just how things work here", are almost always design choices someone made. Someone else can change them. Aleks is Berlin-based, speaks five languages, and was named a Women in Tech Global Role Model in 2024. Her TEDxHSRW talk is "Your Company Is an Organism - Stop Treating It Like a Machine."

Dr. Antje Bothin is an assertive communication coach, trauma‑informed trainer and published author of several books based in Scotland. Originally from Germany, she writes poetry and stories about nature and wellbeing highlighting the resilience found in everyday life. Drawing on her academic background and lived experience, she helps people to find their voice, shine their light and speak with calm authority in high‑stakes conversations. As the founder of Assertive Voices, she empowers individuals to replace self‑silencing with calm confidence. In her talk, Antje explores the power of reclaiming your voice as a catalyst for personal transformation, professional growth and meaningful connection. Her work is shaped by her own journey from a once near-silent child with selective mutism to a calmly confident leader, poet and performer. She shows that assertiveness is not loudness but self‑respect in action and that no matter your past, you can rebuild, rise and reclaim your voice.

Dr. Ejura Yetunde Salihu is a health services researcher and implementation scientist whose work explores how communities, healthcare professionals, and researchers can work together to improve health outcomes and reduce health inequalities. Having lived and worked in Nigeria, the United States, and the United Kingdom, she brings a cross-cultural perspective to designing and implementing health interventions with diverse communities. At TEDxHSRW, she invites audiences to rethink how we define expertise and what it means for the future of healthcare.

Meral Alizada is the founder of Results of Kindness and the originator of Kindness as Infrastructure®, a philosophy and systems-based approach that redefines kindness not as sentiment, softness, or moral ornament, but as a measurable foundation for sustainable human progress. Shaped by lived experience as a neurodivergent woman navigating adversity, exclusion, and the deep cultural traditions of Central Asian communal care, Meral’s work explores how the systems we build either preserve or erode our humanity. In this talk, she challenges the idea that today’s crises, burnout, loneliness, fragmentation, and disconnection, are merely personal failures, arguing instead that many are failures of design. Through a bold civilisational lens, Meral asks what becomes possible when kindness is intentionally built into the structures that shape how we live, lead, work, and belong, moving humanity beyond survival and toward true flourishing.

Dr. Pradeep Ghosh's journey abroad as a young student began with strangers who welcomed him like family - a kindness that showed him how a single human story can open doors that no credential ever could. Today, as a physicist and Head of International Cooperations at FAIR, near Frankfurt, one of Europe's largest Big Science projects, he carries that same belief into science diplomacy: that breakthroughs aren't only about technology, but about people working together. A returning TEDx speaker - having taken the stage at TEDxTUDarmstadt in November 2025, Pradeep has spent eight years coaching over 850 young professionals through career transitions, watching the same pattern repeat: the people who moved forward were rarely the most qualified. They were the ones who finally told their story. At TEDxHSRW, he makes the case that in an age when algorithms decide who gets seen, the story you haven't yet told might be the most powerful thing you own

Ranika Koneru has spent years inside the systems meant to help people heal, and watched them fall short in the same quiet way every time. From running weight loss clinics in the U.S. to co-founding Origynz Longevity in the Netherlands, she kept finding the same distance between the protocols and the people inside them. Today she brings that story, and the science behind it, to leaders, parents, and anyone who has ever tried to take care of someone else. Because what’s slowly eroding our health, our teams, and our families was never a discipline problem. It was always a disconnection problem.

Dr. Valerie Woo is a pediatric dentist, entrepreneur, speaker, and proud daughter of Filipino immigrants. Through her work and personal story, she explores what it means to grow, lead, and become yourself in seasons of change. On the TEDxHSRW stage, Valerie will share the heart behind Half Nester, a concept born from her own life long before motherhood. Through that lens, she speaks to the in-between space so many students know well: between home and independence, family expectations and personal identity, ambition and belonging. With warmth, honesty, and insight, Valerie invites the audience to rethink what it means to be limitless, not by doing more or balancing everything perfectly, but by finding their own rhythm and realizing that becoming yourself is not a betrayal of where you come from.

At nine years old, Winston Nau was not dreaming of becoming a founder, developer, or AI speaker. He was dreaming of one thing: never having to pause his video games. What started as a child’s attempt to make life easier soon became something much bigger: a fascination with coding, automation, and artificial intelligence. Winston began programming at a young age, explored AI long before ChatGPT became a global phenomenon, worked with international clients as a teenager, and now builds real-world AI solutions in Germany. In his TEDx talk, he explores the idea of “Laziness-ology”: how the desire to avoid unnecessary effort can lead to smarter systems, better thinking, and more creative ways of working. But in a world where AI promises to make humans limitless, Winston asks an important question: Are we using AI to make thinking easier — or are we slowly forgetting how to think for ourselves?

Marlow D. Guttmann works in HR and Organizational Development, guiding leaders and young talent through transformation. As a consultant, author, speaker, and mentor, he brings a Generation-Z perspective that bridges generations, and is a sought-after voice on the future of work and AI ethics, featured at conferences and in leading HR and business media. He serves as an honorary judge at Hamburg's Social Court and co-founded the Rotaract Club Hamburg International - part of the Rotary Network - promoting diversity, cultural exchange, volunteer action, and developing young leaders.

In his talk, he shares a personal mentoring story that shows how an AI-driven world accelerates change while leaving early-career professionals feeling lost and unsure of their direction. His message: technology sets the pace, but purpose sets the path: anchored in values, empathy, and human connection.

Dr. Fadi Alshalabi is an educator, researcher, and co-founder of Niuversity, a digital learning platform that has empowered thousands of learners across the Arab world to rebuild their skills and careers through online education and entrepreneurship. After moving to Germany, Fadi discovered that migration is often described as a story of survival - but rarely as a story of creation.

In his talk, Fadi explores how entrepreneurship and digital learning can transform integration from a process of adaptation into one of co-creation, replacing dependence with dignity and turning migration into one of humanity's most powerful startup accelerators.

With a background spanning geochemistry, marine geosciences, sustainability, nanoscience and nanotechnology, Dr. Patricia Jovičević-Klug has always been driven by curiosity. Her passion lies in developing sustainable solutions for critical raw materials (CRMs) - the hidden ingredients behind clean energy, semiconductors, and advanced technologies. She holds two patents in thermochemical catalysis.

In her TEDx talk, she connects Earth and space—using meteorites as storytellers of our planet's magnetism and technological future—to show how what falls from the sky can inspire cleaner, more resilient innovations on Earth.

Dr. Vanessa Maybeck is a bioelectronics researcher with expertise in molecular cell biology and neurobiology. Her work investigates how neurons and man-made devices can communicate through light, electricity, and touch. She has authored 32 peer-reviewed publications with more than 1,400 citations.

In this talk she proposes the hardest part of discovery isn't collecting data - it's knowing when to doubt it. And when to stand by it.

For Dr. Matic Jovičević-Klug, research is more than a profession - it's a calling shaped by curiosity, imagination, and the desire to make a difference. As a materials engineer in science, he sees engineering as storytelling through matter, transforming atoms, energy and their form into new possibilities.

In his talk, he shares how being an engineer means not just solving problems, but imagining futures—crafting the unseen and unknown into the tangible, and shaping a future where innovation and sustainability walk hand in hand.

Being an art enthusiast and hobbyist, Uzair believes that everyone can and should use art as a utility of expression. It can be in the form of drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, or anything that helps us connect better with this world and those around us. He has compiled his drawings with poetry into two self-published books.

His message: Art is a therapy that people can and should lean into.