TEDxHSRW

Speakers

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

• Aleksandra Kireeva

  Senior commercial operator

  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. Abdelrahman Rayan

  Neuroscientist

  Dr. Abdel Rayan is a neuroscientist and founder 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 sleep states across species, bridging animal and human sleep research to better understand how the brain processes experience and memories during sleep. In his TEDx talk, Abdel invites the audience to rethink sleep: not as a passive break during the night, but as an active brain state in which the brain works with experience and memory. Drawing on neuroscience and the everyday experience of sleep, he explores how the brain stabilizes and reshapes memories, allowing parts of one day to be carried into the next.

• Dr. Antje Bothin

  Assertive communication coach

  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 Salihu

  Health services researcher

  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.

• Dr. Pradeep Ghosh

  Physicist

  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

• Dr. Valerie Woo

  Pediatric dentist

  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.

• Ranika Koneru

  Clinic Owner

  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 starting 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.

• Winston Nau

  Student and developer

  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?