TEDxBentleyU

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check the event website for the latest lineup.

• Abby VanVoorhis

  Hi, I am Abby! A Student Leader at Bentley University. Majoring in Business Management with a concentration in Leadership and minor in Sociology. My passion lies in researching higher education, where I explore and research the higher education environment through a business lens. In my free time I enjoy being a Pilates instructor and dogs! My TEDx talk focuses on chronic illness and learning to find joy in the simple moments

• Dier Karimov

  Dier Karimov is a Business Informatics student at Bentley University and WU Vienna, entrepreneur, and content creator. Having lived in Uzbekistan, Russia, Austria, and the United States, he is passionate about personal growth, education, and the psychology behind human decision-making. Through his experiences of relocation, entrepreneurship, and cultural adaptation, Dier explores how childhood experiences shape the way we approach fear, uncertainty, and opportunity later in life.

• Kathy Ball-Toncic

  Kathy Ball-Toncic is the Founding Partner and CEO of The 262 Group, a leadership coaching and consulting firm dedicated to helping individuals and organizations navigate change with clarity, courage, and humanity. For more than 25 years, she has worked with executives and teams across industries to strengthen leadership capacity, emotional intelligence, and resilience. Before founding The 262 Group, Kathy held senior roles on Wall Street leading global teams and driving revenue across Fortune 100 organizations. Today she brings that corporate experience together with leadership development and behavioral science to help leaders move beyond “business as usual” and lead with greater purpose, presence, and impact. She has coached and consulted with leaders internationally across Europe, Canada, South America, and Asia. Kathy is an MCC-credentialed coach through the International Coaching Federation, a Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator, and a Certified Relational Trauma Coach. Her work is informed not only by professional training but also by lived experience, including surviving 9/11 and two cancer diagnoses. A lifelong advocate for community and resilience, Kathy has raised funds for multiple charities while completing twelve marathons. She lives in Boston with her family. For more than 20 years, Kathy has been leveraging her business acumen and leadership development expertise to help clients achieve exceptional, sustainable results. Collaborating with executives, her focus is on personal transformation, innovation and inclusion using an experiential, conscious, and humanistic approach. She leverages her own extensive experience from inside the corporate world to guide leaders toward achieving exceptional results and emotional mastery, both individually and organizationally. Kathy challenges her clients to stretch ‘business as usual’ norms to increase their capacity as leaders and influencers. Her clients learn to recognize their own strengths and challenges and develop strategies to strengthen their leadership presence. Her belief in the importance of using both heart and sword has enabled her clients to maximize their own potential. A leader herself, she is currently Founding Partner and CEO for The 262 Group, leading a successful business and setting a standard of leadership excellence across the company. Kathy has coached and consulted with leaders internationally including Europe, Canada, South America, and Asia. Prior to creating The 262 Group, Inc., Kathy held senior roles on Wall Street leading global teams to drive revenue across Fortune 100 firms. Kathy received her training at The Coaches Institute and MSPP’s Executive Coaching Program. Kathy has her coaching certification as a CPCC (Co-active Professional Coach) and an MCC certification through the ICF. She is a Certified Dare To Lead™ facilitator as well as a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA), She is qualified to use Hogan, DISC, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, LPI, LMAP, Immunity to Change, LSI, OCI, The Leadership Circle and Benchmarks assessment instruments. Additionally, Kathy has a keen interest in volunteerism. She was a “Woman of the Year Nominee” for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and helped raise money for charity while training for and running 11 marathons. After beating cancer, twice, she will participate as a first time rider in the Pan-Mass Challenge as a “Living Proof Rider.” An avid chef, she is also a world traveler and sports enthusiast. She lives in Boston, MA, USA with her family.

• Kelsey Logan

  Kelsey Logan is a public policy graduate, researcher, and founder of The Synch, a community dedicated to helping people live in harmony with their menstrual cycles. Through her academic work and independent research, she has explored topics surrounding menstrual health and the ways nutrition, movement, and lifestyle can support hormonal well-being. She also participated in a research study focused on cycle syncing, deepening her understanding of the science and lived experiences behind menstrual health. Driven by a passion for education and community, Kelsey founded The Synch to create spaces where conversations about periods are normalized and celebrated. Through immersive events, The Synch combines menstrual cycle education with practical experiences, including discussions on how food and movement influence each phase of the cycle, nourishing meals designed with hormonal health in mind, and movement-based offerings such as workout classes that encourage participants to connect with their bodies. By blending research, wellness, and community, Kelsey aims to empower people to better understand their cycles and embrace a more intuitive approach to health and self-care.

• Michael Haikal

  Senior Student-Athlete at Bentley University, Graduated with a B.S. in Finance.

• Michael Shehata

  After breaking his family’s computer as a kid in Egypt, Michael Shehata learned the lesson behind his TEDx talk: a broken system is never a dead end, it’s a puzzle waiting to be solved. Michael Shehata is an NSF Research Fellow and undergraduate at Bentley University, where he double-majors in Mathematical Sciences and Computer Information Systems. His machine learning research has resulted in four peer-reviewed publications; he has also served as a peer reviewer at conferences including COLM and ACL. Michael believes passionately that the best way to grow is to seek what you don’t yet know how to do. He taught himself to code, became the first student from his high school to apply to universities in the United States, and during a gap year researched plastic pollution using robotics and machine learning, ranking 44th out of 50,000 at the Climate Science Olympiad. He has trained hundreds of students in robotics across Egypt, led teams to international competition wins, and taught coding globally through Stanford University’s Code in Place, from children to engineers and doctors across Asia, Europe, and the United States. Michael served as the top research collaborator and instructor for a Stanford University machine learning curriculum, and designed cybersecurity intrusion detection systems at Carnegie Mellon University. When he entered a national karate tournament with two months to prepare and a coach who said it was impossible, he ranked third nationally.

• Paul Grabert

  A full-time student and business owner, and a part-time world traveler.

• Sofia Samper

  Sofia Samper is an international student at Bentley University studying Business Economics and Marketing. Originally from Spain and Ecuador, she has traveled to over 20 countries, an experience that has shaped her global perspective and curiosity about people, cultures, and innovation. Passionate about entrepreneurship, consulting, public speaking, and fashion, Sofia is the co-founder of Orbit and SAMO Magazine. Through launching ventures, embracing new opportunities, and taking risks, she has learned that growth rarely comes from certainty—it comes from moving forward despite fear. Her work is driven by a desire to challenge self-imposed limits, inspire others to embrace discomfort, and create meaningful impact.

• Sophia Guerra

  Sophia Guerra was raised between São Paulo and Miami, an upbringing that gave her a global perspective and an early fascination with how people make decisions, and why fear so often gets in the way. A problem-solver at heart, she's drawn to the human side of design: understanding why people choose what they choose, and building experiences that help them move with more confidence. Her work bridges behavior and technology. She studied Experience Design at Bentley University and completed MIT's Applied Agentic AI program, and she co-authored a paper on LLM-enhanced learning published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (AIED 2025), research later presented at UXPA Boston 2025. Across roles in design, sales, and community-building, from interning at Procter & Gamble to launching cultural programs rooted in her Brazilian heritage, she keeps returning to one question: what makes people move forward, and what holds them back. In "You Can Always Hit Undo," she draws on a single usability test to challenge a belief that quietly limits many of us: that our choices are written in permanent ink.

• Yvonne Armenta

  Yvonne Armenta is a Communications and Community Leader, Facilitator, and Storytelling & Speaking Coach. Having built her career designing communication systems for major tech and media brands, she has spent nearly a decade navigating the intersections of her lived experience as an introvert and first-generation Latina within environments that typically reward extroversion. As the founder of ¡Latina, Presente! and creator of Public Speaking con Cultura, she designs learning experiences with the philosophy that the tools for leading and moving people are always found in our lived experiences and deep reflection. Grounded in the belief that our story is the strategy, Yvonne guides leaders who are ready to step into their voice, share their story, and communicate with confidence on stages, in their organizations, and within the communities they lead.