Social entreprenuer, city-builder, and military officer

Title of Presentation How to Change the World

About Kevin Kevin Vuong is social entrepreneur focused on building a more prosperous and resilient Canada that leaves no one behind. Believing in the power of social innovation as a vehicle for building healthier livelihoods, sustainable development, and social impact, he left a career in banking and capital markets to dive wholeheartedly into social enterprise. Today, Kevin leads the Agency for Public + Social Innovation where he is working to improve Ontario’s social innovation ecosystem through capital, capacity-building, and scaling services. He is also a Local Pathways Fellow for the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Principal Innovator for a social initiative with the Institute for Global Health Equity & Innovation to redress health inequities through social innovation. For his service and impact, Kevin has been named one of Her Majesty The Queen’s Young Leaders and Canada’s Top 30 Under 30 for building more sustainable, liveable cities.

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Twitter: @VuongKevin

Mechanical engineering student at the University of Toronto

Title of Presentation Big Ideas and Small Satellites: Youth as Today’s Technical Project Powerhouses

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About Katie Katie Gwozdecky is a mechanical engineering student at the University of Toronto insatiably curious about the world around her, and passionate about building strong interdisciplinary teams of driven individuals in her highly technical projects. She has years of experience in engineering teams, and firmly believes in the power of positive and inspiring leadership in generating high quality work. She is currently leading the University of Toronto Aerospace Team’s Space Systems division, where her team is developing a low-cost, high-throughput astrobiology nanosatellite to revolutionize how teams around the world collect scientific research in orbit. Simultaneously, she is currently working at neurosurgical engineering company Synaptive Medical, helping to design robotic hardware that will help surgeons reduce risk and increase accuracy in the operating room. One day she hopes to blend her work in space engineering and medicine by designing life support systems that help astronauts survive the harsh environments of space while on missions to Mars and beyond.

Co-founder of Two Small Fish Ventures

Title of Presentation The Crowd and the Machine

About Eva Entrepreneur turned Angel Investor, Eva is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Two Small Fish Ventures. She has extensive knowledge and experience in building Internet products and online communities. Before starting Two Small Fish Ventures, she was Wattpad’s Head of Community and Content. She helped nurture and scale the Wattpad community from its infancy to become one of the largest online communities with tens of millions of monthly users around the world. Prior to Wattpad, she was Director of Product Development of Brightspark Labs, a Toronto based accelerator. During her tenure at Brightspark Labs she mentored and helped many tech startups in Toronto. Eva has a bachelor degree in Industrial Engineering from University of Toronto and an MBA from Schulich School of Business. Her husband constantly teases her that the two degrees offset each other.

Twitter: @MrsEvaLau

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalau/

Wattpad: www.wattpad.com/evalau

IMAX filmmaker

Title of Presentation IMAX: A film maker’s life-changing view 

About Toni Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, TONI MYERS is a veteran IMAX® filmmaker, credited in more than 18 IMAX films spanning a multi-faceted career of over 40 years. She was editor and writer of  IMAX’s groundbreaking space trilogy: THE DREAM IS ALIVE, BLUE PLANET, and DESTINY IN SPACE.  With the advent of IMAX®3D, Myers wrote, edited, and co-produced the award-winning DEEP SEA3D, and UNDER THE SEA3D with Howard and Michele Hall. She was Producer/Director/Writer/Editor of SPACE STATION3D, and HUBBLE3D, each awarded Best Film by the Giant Screen Cinema Association, and among the most successful IMAX documentaries ever made. 

Myers has enjoyed a long and productive association with NASA as a key member of the IMAX team that has trained 145 astronauts and cosmonauts in IMAX film making for 24 missions flown over 25 years. She has worked closely with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, marrying data from space-based observatories with pioneering computer techniques to allow audiences of all ages to explore the wonders of the cosmos in IMAX. To date, over 100 million people have seen the IMAX space films worldwide. In addition to her IMAX work, Myers has many television drama and feature films to her credit, including pioneering music films with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Santana. Her music skills were later utilized as Associate Producer and Supervising Editor on the IMAX film ROLLING STONES AT THE MAX.

Most recently, Myers produced and directed the 3D IMAX film A BEAUTIFUL PLANET for which Myers and team trained 4 International Space Station crews who captured material for the film over a year aboard the Station. The film documents life aboard the completed Station, and examines the changes to our Earth as seen from the crews’ unique perspective in orbit. The film was released in Spring, 2016.

Toni Myers lives in Toronto, and very much enjoys the company of her son, step-daughter, and 3 grandchildren.

Co-founder of Emoji Health

Title of Presentation The Everyday Innovator

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About Alex Alexandra Philp Reeves is a grade twelve student at Branksome Hall and the founder of EmojiHealth. She began in innovation journey in the summer of 2015 when she attended the SHAD program at the University of British Columbia and led a team of more than forty students in creating a subscription box service and brand. In June 2016, she began working on EmojiHealth, a messenger bot that activates teens to take an active role in their health and wellness. EmojiHealth has participated in and won awards at the Catapult and Cossette accelerators, and Alexandra has pitched to audiences at both SXSW and Singularity University's Exponential Medicine. She will be attending Stanford University beginning in the fall of this year to study Product Design Engineering and Symbolic Systems.

Director, photographer, activist, public speaker, and sustainable development specialist

Title of Presentation Connection is the Key to Conservation

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About Danielle  Danielle is an acclaimed photographer and director whose main focus is storytelling to empower people around the world to solve the most challenging problems. She is also Co-Founder of the Sumatran Wildlife Sanctuary and sits on the board of Toronto's Sexual Assault Action Coalition. Danielle's research and experience have led her to believe that without remembering the needs and motivations of people, we can not tackle such problems as climate change and conservation effectively. As a result she has become an avid student and teacher in the world of campaign psychology. She has earned an Honours Bachelor of Science Degrees in Conservation Biology, Psychology and Global Studies from the University of Western Ontario, as well as an MSc. in Environment and Development from the London School of Economics. She has published research in the book Climate Governance in the Developing World (Held, Roger & Nag, 2013) and completed a distinguished Master's dissertation exploring the psychology of climate change messaging. She has had images published by National Geographic, the United Nations, The Economist, and the book Cities, Slums and Gender in the Global South: Towards a Feminised Urban Future (Chant & McIlwaine, 2016), among others. Danielle has worked with hundreds of NGOs, travelled to over 60 countries, and learned more than 6 languages including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, some Swahili (and is currently working on Arabic, Indonesian and ASL). Her proudest cinematography achievement to date is having Sir David Attenborough narrate over her footage of Sumatra and Sumatran orangutans for the prestigious Whitley Awards. She is also the creator and director of the PWB TV web series. She is the recipient of the Canadian Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders Award and has been nominated for Canada's Top 100 Powerful Women 2016, 2016 RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Awards, and the 2015 Women in Biz Social Good Award. One of her first major lectures was a TEDx talk on the importance of photography and grassroots narratives. She is an instructor for the Environmental Visual Communications program's Multimedia Narratives module taught at the Royal Ontario Museum, she teaches photo documentary workshops around the world and is also sought after for consulting and public speaking engagements.

Twitter: @DaniellePWB

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Founding director of the Art Canada Institute/Institut de l'art du Canada

Title of Presentation The Accelerated Museum: Looking at art in the 21st century

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About Sara Sara Angel holds a PhD in art history from the University of Toronto. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Art Canada Institute, a bilingual organization dedicated to Canadian art history research, education, and promotion. For her doctoral work she received a Trudeau Doctoral Scholarship, the most prestigious award of its kind in Canada, given for innovative ideas that help solve issues of critical importance to Canadians. A recognized authority on visual culture, Angel has been a guest lecturer at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Israel Museum. One of Canada's most accomplished visual arts journalists, Angel writes for publications including Maclean’s, The Walrus, and The Globe and Mail to make the world of art accessible to a broad public audience. She has had an extensive career in publishing, including being a commentator for CBC television’s On the Arts and editor-in-chief of Chatelaine.

Neurosurgeon and Researcher at The Hospital for Sick Children

Title of Presentation Beyond Brain Surgery

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About Peter Dr. Peter Dirks is a neurosurgeon and Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He holds a Garron Chair in Childhood Cancer Research at SickKids.  He is a Professor of Surgery and Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. Dr. Dirks grew up in Montreal and Vancouver and went to Queen's University to study Medicine.  He did a residency in Neurosurgery at the University of Toronto and a Paediatric Neurosurgery Fellowship at Necker Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris. He specializes in neurosurgery of infants and children, particularly brain tumour surgery and surgery of blood vessel malformations. His laboratory was the first to identify cancer stem cells in human brain tumours in 2004. These cells are rare within the larger tumour mass, and are thought to be responsible for brain tumour recurrence after treatment. His current research work focuses on identifying new treatments for these brain tumour stem cells. He leads the Stand Up to Cancer Canada Cancer Stem Cell Dream team, a nationwide multidisciplinary project focused on discovering and testing new treatments for children and adults with brain tumours. His wife is a radiologist and he has four daughters.

Twitter: @BrainSurgn1989