Two Penn graduates will join the lineup of speakers at TEDxPenn’s annual conference next weekend.
The March 28 conference, designed around a “Mosaic” theme, will be held at Irvine Auditorium and feature nine speakers. 2021 Engineering graduate and CEO of robotics company Cerulion Lakshay Sharma and 2012 College graduate and contemporary artist Allison Zuckerman will both present during the five-hour event.
College junior and TEDxPenn Speaker and Content Co-Director Christina Kodsi told The Daily Pennsylvanian that Sharma and Zuckerman reflect the conference’s theme and “fit into the mosaic of ideas worth sharing.”
“These are two drastically different paths of people who both started at Penn that have created something so beautiful and so impressive in their own respects,” Kodsi said.
TEDxPenn organizers expressed that the conference aims to bring in speakers from a wide range of disciplines. Girls Who Invest Founder and Chair Seema Hingorani, Palantir Privacy and Civil Liberties Engineer John Grant, and Global AI advisor and former OpenAI Head of GTM Zack Kass will also join the event.
The lineup selection process began in fall 2025, when members of TEDxPenn’s Speaker and Content Team invited prospective contributors to audition. Kodsi explained that speakers are selected based on “audition quality and potential cohesion” with the conference theme.
Kodsi added that TEDxPenn is structured to introduce students to experiences they have “never been exposed to in the classroom.” Team members work with speakers to develop their talks, in order to fit a student audience through a series of drafts and revisions.
“You’re taking the ideas that underpin their entire work and career and figuring out how to bring them to the surface and make them palatable to the Penn and Philadelphia audience,” Kodsi said. “We work with them to write talks and ensure that the ideas we want to get shared, get shared.”
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College senior and TEDxPenn Speaker and Content Co-Director Skyla Rimple told the DP that working closely with speakers is a central part of the organization’s work.
“Being the primary liaison for a speaker and sitting backstage watching them give the talk that you helped write, and really seeing it all come to life is very rewarding,” Rimple added.
Organizers also noted that the conference includes outreach beyond the University. College junior and TEDxPenn Curator Kana Unigame told the DP that the group has partnered with high school students in the Philadelphia area, who assist in marketing the conference to “non UPenn students.”
TEDxPenn was initially founded in 2010 as a student-led initiative aimed at bringing TED-style talks to the University and Philadelphia community.
Kodsi explained that “some of the talks will challenge the way that Penn students tend to think” by presenting new material and perspectives.
“To hear someone from Palantir speak about privacy and civil liberties is not something you’d expect,” she added. “If you hear something during a conference that you don’t agree with, you get to walk away even stronger with the opinion that you had before.”
