Claudia Mezey

Engineer

Innovating and meeting human need in the built environment; Understanding the patterns of growth and underlying socioeconomic forces and agendas at play in the lives of cities

Can we lower recidivism rates and promote rehabilitation within the criminal justice system solely through prison design?

I've always been drawn to how trailblazers in their fields see our world, particularly in using their knowledge to define, dissect, or illuminate fundamental truths about our human needs and motives. The lectures I've attended - by female victims of sexual assault in the military or freedom fighters like Bryan Stevenson - have irrevocably influenced how I view and relate to the intricacies of the communities around me. Since, I've realized even more so the significance of sharing ideas and moving others to think about new ideas. For this reason, I joined TEDxYale in the fall of 2015 and have since had the honor of serving as Co-Curator for the 2016-2017 calendar year. TEDxYale devotes itself to TED's noble yet inherently humble mission- a mission that I wholly value and have come to see as essential: to nurture storytelling, to inform, and to encourage dialogue. After organizing and attending my first TED conference this year (TEDxYale: Mind the Gap), I view the construct of the TED talk to be singularly conducive to collaborative thinking, to camaraderie in inquiry, and to fruitful dialogue. As a platform, the TED talk hinges on a mutual engagement of the audience by the speaker and the speaker by the audience. Throughout TEDxYale: Mind the Gap, I observed as our fifteen speakers led the audience on a series of intellectual journeys wherein reciprocity and exchange of ideas, big and small, rooted in hard fact or whimsical aspiration, reined. Through the act of communicating their ideas so as to empower the audience, these TED speakers not only offered us skills for our own toolboxes but also, more importantly, validated the indispensable role of knowledge external to their own in enriching their work and giving it meaning.

Baking layer cakes, waterskiing