Artist’s concept of NASA’s NEOWISE Earth-orbiting infrared telescope. Carrie Nugent works on a team that uses NEOWISE to identify and observe asteroids and comets. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

These 21 Rising Stars Will Change the World in 2016

A Hawaiian geneticist working to make genetic testing more representative. A Ghanaian-American television producer who created Africa’s Sex and the City. A Canadian biohacker growing human cells in his lab. A biomedical entrepreneur inventing a device to beat pancreatic cancer. These amazing innovators are all 2016 TED Fellows, and will gather at the TED Conference in February in Vancouver, Canada to share their big idea with the world. Get to know them and their groundbreaking work now.

Nicole Amarteifio (Ghana + USA)

TV director / producer

Nicole Amarteifio is the writer and director of An African City, a hit web series that follows the friendships, careers and romantic lives of five successful women from Ghana and Nigeria navigating 21st century life in Accra. The show — which has been hailed as Africa’s Sex and the City — features cutting-edge African fashion designers and musicians and will premiere its second season in January 2016.

The cast of the hit web series An African City. Photo: Emmanuel Bobbie

Blitz the Ambassador (Ghana)

Musician + filmmaker

Samuel Bazawule — also known as Blitz the Ambassador — is a hip hop artist and filmmaker. Based in Ghana and Brooklyn, Blitz uses magical realism in his music and film to explore modern African identity and aesthetic around the world. His most recent, genre-bending album Afropolitan Dreams came out in 2014 to critical acclaim.

Sanford Biggers (USA)

Interdisciplinary artist

Artist Sanford Biggers uses a combination of painting, sculpture, immersive installation and video to expose the complexity of historical narrative, touching on challenging topics ranging from pop culture to politics. His series of quilts, for instance, is inspired by those used along the Underground Railroad to help slaves navigate their way to freedom, and is infused with contemporary references. His work has been shown at the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum, the Studio Museum Harlem and the Brooklyn Museum. Biggers also creates multimedia musical performances with his band Moon Medicin.

“Everyday a Sunset Dies” (LKG), 2014. Antique quilts, assorted fabrics, fabric treated acrylic, spray paint. Photo: Sanford Biggers

Prosanta Chakrabarty (USA)

Ichthyologist

Prosanta Chakrabarty is an ichthyologist researching and discovering fish around the world, including the otherworldly creature pictured below: the pancake batfish. His work helps us to understand evolution and continental drift patterns by identifying and comparing the DNA of different populations of fish around the world.

The very, very weird looking pancake batfish. Photo: Prosanta Chakrabarty

Keolu Fox (USA)

Geneticist + indigenous rights activist

Hawaiian geneticist Keolu Fox’s mission is to increase ethnic diversity in genome studies in order to figure out why certain populations — including indigenous peoples — experience higher rates of common chronic diseases. He is also creating tools that empower indigenous peoples to be partners in their own health research, including a mobile genome-sequencing platform, interactive informed consent forms and a tribal consultation resource.

Kiana Hayeri (Iran + Canada)

Photographer

Kiana Hayeri is an Iranian-Canadian photographer exploring complex topics such as youth culture, migration and sexuality in the Middle East. Her most recent work explored underground gay culture in Iran and the recruitment of children by all sides of the armed forces in Afghanistan.

In northern Tehran, a group of third-graders play “Sangasar,” a game similar to American dodgeball. Photo: Kiana Hayeri

Laura Indolfi (Italy + USA)

Biomedical entrepreneur

Italian biomedical engineer and entrepreneur Laura Indolfi is revolutionizing cancer treatments with smart biomaterials for drug delivery and cell therapy. Her company PanTher Therapeutics is engineering an implantable, biocompatible device that delivers high concentrations of cancer-fighting drugs inside tumors while simultaneously containing cancer progression with a physical barrier.

Bektour Iskender (Kyrgyzstan)

Independent news publisher

Bektour Iskender is the co-founder of Kloop Media, an NGO and leading news publication in Kyrgyzstan, committed to freedom of speech and to training young journalists to cover politics and culture. Most journalists at Kloop are between the ages of 14 and 25, and they’ve broken stories about government corruption and investigated anti-gay activity in the country.

Azat Ruziev, 18, was one of Kloop Journalism School’s youngest students — he was just 14 when he started. Today he’s producing feature stories and mini-documentaries. Photo: Anna Lelik, Kloop Media

Mitchell Jackson (USA)

Writer + filmmaker

Writer and filmmaker Mitchell Jackson explores black masculinity, the criminal justice system and family relationships in fiction, essays and documentary film. His autobiographical novel The Residue Years, which recounts growing up poor and black in Portland, Oregon—then considered the whitest city in America — won the Ernest J Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and was named a finalist for several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. Mitchell also speaks at prisons, colleges, youth facilities and community centers, advocating for people who are confronting risks similar to those of his own youth.

Mitchell Jackson speaking at Santiam Prison in Salem, Oregon, where he himself was released. Photo: John Ricard

Jessica Ladd (USA)

Sexual health technologist

Jessica Ladd is the founder and CEO of Sexual Health Innovations, a nonprofit dedicated to creating technology to advance sexual health. SHI’s initiative Callisto, for instance, provides a platform for college students to report sexual assault confidentially and is currently being piloted on college campuses in the United States.

Majala Mlagui (Kenya)

Gemologist + mining entrepreneur

Majala Mlagui is the founder of Thamani Gems, an organization that empowers small-scale gemstone miners in East Africa. While artisanal and small-scale miners produce 80% of the world’s fine gems at huge personal risk, they only see a small fraction of the multibillion-dollar profits. Thamani Gems is bringing industry profits back into local communities and fostering professional development.

Tsavorite Green Garnet gemstones — fondly known as the”green gold” of Kenya for their high value and brilliance — from a community mining site in Mkuki-Taita Taveta near Tsavo West National Park. Image courtesy Majala Mlagui

Hélène Morlon (France)

Biodiversity mathematician

Biodiversity mathematician Hélène Morlon creates computer models to help us understand the history of life and evolution on our planet. By deciphering how ecosystems responded to past environmental changes, Hélène’s work will help better predict how planet Earth will respond to human-driven environmental changes in the future.

Amanda Nguyen (USA)

Policymaker

Amanda Nguyen is the founder and president of Rise, a national nonprofit working with multiple state legislatures and the US Congress to implement a Sexual Assault Survivor Bill of Rights. If passed at the federal level, the Bill of Rights would grant 25 million sexual assault survivors in America comprehensive civil rights protections.

Amanda Nguyen’s nonprofit organization Rise fights for sexual assault survivors’ rights in the US. Image courtesy of Amanda Nguyen

Carrie Nugent (USA)

Asteroid hunter

Carrie Nugent is an asteroid hunter who uses NASA’s NEOWISE Earth-orbiting infrared telescope to discover and study near-Earth asteroids — small and numerous cosmic neighbors that can teach us a lot about our galaxy’s long history.

Nikhil Pahwa (India)

Digital rights advocate

Nikhil Pahwa is a journalist and free speech and digital rights advocate. He co-founded the Save the Internet.in coalition, which brought together activists from across India and galvanized the support of more than a million citizens for net neutrality.

Andrew Pelling (Canada)

Scientist + biohacker

Andrew Pelling uses low-cost, open source materials to create next-generation medical innovations. He heads up the curiosity-driven Pelling Lab for Biophysical Manipulation, dedicated to creating living, functional, biological objects that do not exist in nature by physically manipulating and repurposing living systems.

Pelling Lab has grown human tissues inside an apple, showing that it’s possible to create functional, biological composites without manipulating DNA. Photo: Andrew Pelling

Madeline Sayet (USA)

Theater director + playwright

Madeline Sayet highlights indigenous perspectives through original theater productions — from reinterpretations of Shakespeare to absurdist comedy. This past summer at the Glimmerglass Festival, she staged a production of The Magic Flute that embedded indigenous ideologies and themes into the classic opera.

Madeline Sayet’s The Magic Flute from The Glimmerglass Festival. Photo: Karli Cadel

Sam Stranks (UK + Australia)

Solar energy researcher

Sam Stranks is an experimental physicist pioneering the field of low-cost solar cells made from a material called hybrid perovskites — which over the last three years have become nearly as efficient as industry leader silicon. Sam imagines a future in which a printer in every home will be able to cheaply “print” solar cells, ensuring wider access to environmentally friendly energy.

Gold electrodes on a red perovskite solar cell, which is thinner than a postage stamp. Photographed for Scientific American by Plamen Petrov

Trevor Timm (USA)

Free speech advocate

Trevor Timm is founder and executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the First Amendment by supporting and defending public-interest journalism focused on government transparency and accountability. Trevor’s team developed SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that lets media organizations securely accept documents from and communicate with anonymous sources.

Michael Twitty (USA)

Culinary historian

Michael Twitty is a culinary historian, blogger and chef who travels the American South to bring communities together through cooking. In the process, he challenges cultural appropriation, reclaims endangered cultural history and promotes culinary justice. You might know him from his viral Open Letter to Paula Deen, which addressed Deen’s racist comments as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship between racially divided communities.

Michael Twitty uses Southern food to start a conversation about race and cultural appropriation in America. Photo: Andrew Kornylak

Vanessa Wood (Switzerland + USA)

Electrical engineer

Electrical engineer Vanessa Wood uses nanomaterials to revolutionize energy systems — from solar cells to batteries. She founded Battrion, a company that’s producing a new tool for battery manufacturers that will enable fabrication of lower-cost, higher-performance, safer batteries for electric vehicles.

The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.