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Syracuse University professors and students will share their stories and research on Thursday as part of this year’s TEDx SyracuseUniversity event. The talks, centered around the theme “The New Age of Enlightenment,” will last around seven to 18 minutes each.

Hosted by former Syracuse basketball player Eric Devendorf, the event will run from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and will be livestreamed from the Westcott Theater. The six speakers are Bailey Felix, Luca Serio, Noelle Johnson, Tula Goenka, Vedyun Mishra and Zeke Leonard.

The Daily Orange spoke with the presenters about their vision for the talks and the process of creating them.

Bailey Felix

In high school, Felix considered herself the one kid who always had an injury. She went to numerous doctor appointments and found that many doctors didn’t know what to do or how to help. It was never easy or straightforward, she said.

“If only someone was doing research as to what was wrong with me, maybe I wouldn’t feel so miserable,” Felix said.

Felix, a senior bioengineering major, has worked in the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute to research four-dimensional printing shape memory polymers. She wants to use the TEDx platform to make scientific research more accessible to everyone.

Since 2019, Felix has had the opportunity to explore shape memory polymers by conducting research with James Henderson, an associate professor of biomedical and chemical engineering, and Kathleen Pieri, a graduate research assistant. She received a $5,000 undergraduate research grant to fund her work, which helped Felix stand out for the TEDx Talk.

Figuring out how to explain scientific concepts with everyday language was a challenge Felix encountered while preparing her speech. She started her research sophomore year, and creating the talk reminded her of the different analogies that helped her when she was learning.

Noelle Johnson

For Johnson, an unforeseen benefit of creating a TEDx Talk is the newfound sense of community at SU. One uniting experience during the pandemic is feeling isolated, she said.

“Especially as an incoming freshman, I didn’t feel super tied anywhere. This experience has helped me feel like an active member of the community and has given me the chance to see what SU is really like,” said Johnson, a freshman acting major.

Shannon Kirkpatrick | Presentation Director

In her talk, Johnson shares her experience of growing up in Southern California without a real-life queer role model and finding a sense of identity and community through queer representation in the media.

“Sometimes people don’t fully understand how much representation affects people until they hear it from an individual’s story,” Johnson said.

In her first year of high school, Johnson was bullied for her sexuality, and she transferred to the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan — where Johnson started to accept and become proud of her identity, and where she wrote her TEDx talk.

Johnson specifically crafted her talk to be accessible to both people in and outside of the queer community. Johnson hopes that audience members who aren’t in the LGBTQ community can learn about the role media plays in the community’s view of self image.

Johnson is optimistic about the future of queer representation, and she believes that powerful storytelling can be a part of this positive change.

“I hope to be a part of the new wave of queer content creators. We have queer artists who are going to change how our stories are being seen and being told,” Johnson said.

Tula Goenka

Goenka has many accolades and titles attached to her name, but Thursday night, she’ll delve into being a professor at the Newhouse School of Public Communications and a breast cancer survivor.

“I’m going to talk about things people don’t know about, certain things that happened in my journey,” Goenka said.

Goenka’s talk will focus on her breast cancer journey and how she documented it through photography and multimedia visuals to give voice to people affected by breast cancer in central New York. Goenka is a passionate storyteller and has shared individual stories through an art exhibition in 2019 titled “TitBits.” The exhibition also featured a documentary theater piece that she produced and directed.

The preparation process for her TEDx talk has been therapeutic, but choosing to be vulnerable is also a bit nerve-wracking. People have told her, “Oh, but you’re a professor, you’re used to commanding a room,” she said. Goenka is most nervous about the event being a livestream in an empty Westcott Theater.

One way Goenka prepared for her talk was by practicing in front of her students when they had spare time in class.

The professor has wanted to participate in a TEDx talk for a while. She has kept a TEDx logo on her vision board for the past several years, but every time she’d think of applying, the deadline had passed. That changed this year, when she followed the official Instagram — keeping a close eye on all of their announcements — and applied for the TedxSyracuse and got accepted.

“A dream come true,” Goenka said.

Vedyun Mishra

Mishra’s TEDx talk focuses on “responsible architecture,” and part of his aim is to bridge the gap between sustainability and inclusivity within architecture.

A graduate student in the School of Architecture, Mishra wants to highlight that there are not enough discussions about the inclusion of people with autism in the architecture community.
A couple of years ago, Mishra met with parents whose children have autism. Mishra and his team designed a project focusing on the combination of sustainability and inclusivity within architecture.

Shannon Kirkpatrick | Presentation Director

Mishra has now been involved in this project for two years. While he has presented his project at the New York State Green Building Conference, hosted by SUNY-ESF, and the U.S Department of Energy Solar Decathlon Design Challenge, he knew that TEDxSyracuse would be a powerful opportunity to bring more awareness to the topic.

The process of creating his talk has been a difficult one, with four to five different recreations. Although he hopes his message will reach audiences of architects and designers who can incorporate empathy into their future productions, Mishra wants his message to reach various audiences, and he is using empathy to achieve this.

“The idea is to create that sense of empathy, that people really care about doing something good for the world and that it is possible, not just when you are designing a building or a product but when you’re talking or the way you talk or interact with people,” Mishra said.

Zeke Leonard

Zeke Leonard is an assistant professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts and a member of the Environmental and Interior Design faculty. Leonard’s TEDx talk is about value systems and the ways ideas are constructed about what is valuable.

“We have allowed ourselves to be removed from the conversation about how we construct those value systems,” Leonard said. “We are allowing other people to tell us what we shouldn’t value. We’re not thinking why we value what we value.”

Leonard worked in stage and set design in New York City for 18 years, until one year, he realized that he had used and thrown out 75 sheets of plywood. The realization made him question what he was doing, and he assessed his value system and whether he was creating positive change.

He decided he could no longer engage in the theater industry and went to graduate school to create furniture.

He credits Sarah Ungvary, TEDxSyracuse’s creative director, with helping him narrow his topic to a specific category of values when compiling his talk. Leonard also wishes there were more forums like TEDxSyracuse on campus for people to connect and really talk about topics that matter.

Editor’s note: Luca Serio is the executive producer of The Daily Orange’s Sportcast. He does not work for the Culture section, nor does he influence its content in any way.

Published on April 8, 2021 at 1:44 am