TEDxMenlo College is back!Date: November 14, 2026Time: 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm PTLocation: Florence Moore Auditorium
Our theme for TEDxMenlo College 2026 is Sustaining What Matters.
With this theme, we ask: what matters, and what does it take to sustain it?
Sometimes the hardest part is figuring out what matters to us. But once we do, we know it’s worth protecting, and that it takes effort to keep alive.
This year’s speakers take up that question from many angles: finding joy that doesn’t depend on the next achievement, protecting creativity in the age of A.I., and building sanctuary, friendship, and community. They look at how we talk about mental health, how we recover from loss, how we show up in daily life, and how our choices and service shape the world around us.
Together, these talks remind us that sustaining what matters is rarely accidental. It takes attention, practice, and care.
This year’s event features Menlo College students, alumni, faculty, and staff, each inviting us to consider what is worth protecting, and what it takes to keep it alive.
Angel Allen is a sophomore at Menlo College from New York, where she is pursuing a B.A. in Psychology while competing on the women’s basketball team. She attended The Hotchkiss School, a boarding school in Connecticut, where her interest in psychology began after taking a social psychology course. Since then, her interest has grown through her college coursework, study of philosophy, and experience as a volunteer crisis counselor. Angel is especially interested in understanding how people see the world from different perspectives and hopes to pursue a career as a therapist, where she can help others better understand themselves and navigate their own experiences. Her speech explores her ongoing journey of understanding the difference between chasing happiness and cultivating an internal sense of joy, purpose, and self-worth.
From basketball and academics to relationships and achievement, this talk explores the ways external outcomes can become tied to our sense of worth. Through personal experience and psychological and philosophical perspectives, Angel examines what it means to cultivate joy from within rather than constantly placing happiness on the other side of the next accomplishment.
Barett Hoover is a musician and sound designer who has spent more than twenty years both making music and building the organizations that make it possible. As Director of Performing Arts at Menlo College, he created the college’s performing arts program from the ground up — across drama, dance, and instrumental and vocal performance — and directs its inaugural jazz ensemble, with a focus on improvisation, collaboration, and ensemble learning. Before Menlo, he led opera, theatre, chamber music, and orchestral organizations in Hawai’i and the Bay Area, including Hawai’i Opera Theatre, Chamber Music Hawai’i, the Bay Philharmonic, and Leeward Theatre, always centering work rooted in community, place, and a sense of belonging. For this TEDx talk, he is joined onstage by Menlo College student musicians Ananyaa Vengurlegar on drums, Nathan Springer on bass, and Paul Chaubet on guitar.
A.I. can now close the gap between what you can imagine and what you can create — instantly. But that gap was never empty: it’s where artists find their voice and where new music is born. Backed by live student performances, this talk asks what we lose when we fill it.
Elijah’s discovery of self has led him through higher education, non-profit management, and workforce strategy, leveraging behavioral analytics and systems design to empower people navigating chaos, transition, and growth. Currently leading student career initiatives at Menlo College, he translates this focus into practice by blending data-driven frameworks with deep, human-centered strategy. Driven by the belief that healing is both personal and collective, Elijah hopes to use his own recovery journey as an example for others seeking stillness in a loud world. His TEDx talk illustrates how finding our own somatic sanctuaries and protecting the natural spaces that sustain us can help us break cycles of chronic stress and reconnect with what truly matters.
His talk is “Find Your Sanctuary: Protecting the Spaces That Heal and Connect Us”Where do you go when your nervous system needs a rest? In a world increasingly dominated by digital noise and rapid change, it’s easy to become disconnected from our natural baseline. By prioritizing our nervous system, we step away from distractions to reconnect with the natural world and the communities that truly sustain us. Transformation happens from the inside out.
Giselle Martinez earned her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Menlo College. She went on to get her master’s from Stanford University School of Medicine in Community Health and Prevention Research. Throughout her life, she has been drawn to travel and to learning about people and their social perspectives, a curiosity that’s taken her to 38 countries so far. Her curiosity shapes her study of how clinical language can be used to benefit or harm our personal lives. Giselle teaches Psychology at her alma mater, Menlo College, and plays in a Bay Area band. She is always chasing a side quest.
Clinical diagnoses have escaped the therapist’s office and become part of our daily communication. Our speaker traces this pattern back to the early 1900’s and Ellis Island immigration, showing how dubious clinical language has long been used to marginalize people throughout history. Giselle’s talk defines psychologically literacy versus psychological understanding and how these can be used to benefit or harm our relationships.
Ikram Mansori is a U.S. Army combat veteran, educator, and entrepreneur. She deployed in support of OIF, OEF, and OND before moving into strategic Military Intelligence. Her career since has spanned technology, policy, and nonprofit leadership: the NSA, counterterrorism at Twitter, and nearly a decade building programs that have helped tens of thousands of veterans and military spouses enter tech and entrepreneurship. She served as President of the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Commission and as COO of VetsinTech. Today she is CEO and founder of Atlas Ops and teaches at Menlo College. A proud Mission High Bear from San Francisco, she studied at UC Davis and holds an MSEI from the University of San Francisco and a DBA from Golden Gate University. She is most proud of being a mom.
The Power of the Shower
Four hours into her first deployment to Iraq, Ikram Mansori lost a battle buddy. She was nineteen. That night she found a rusted shower trailer on a gravel lot, and with it, the practice that would carry her through the next twelve months and the years after.
We train people to perform. Nobody trains them to recover.
Drawing on military resilience training, neuroscience, and a thousand-year-old Moroccan ritual she hated as a child, Mansori makes a case that will change how you think about the most ordinary ten minutes of your day. What her grandmother practiced as sacred cleansing is what science now calls parasympathetic regulation. We called it folklore. We should have called it medicine.
You will leave with a reset you can run tonight. No app. No prescription. No permission required.
Lachlan is a Menlo College Student Athlete studying AI & Analytics from Sydney, Australia. After moving to California, he believed deep friendships in life were only discovered when we are young. Until a last minute decision to go to Mexico, he would be proven wrong.
He will draw on his personal experience to explore how shared experiences can quietly turn strangers into more. His TEDx talk invites audiences to think about markers of compatibility and challenge them and consider how simply going through something together can build and sustain friendship.
Lachlan’s talk ranges from chocolate-eating to mountaineering. He challenges us to rethink what it really takes to sustain and nurture the most important thing in life: our friendships. Drawing on more than 15 years of experience with his closest friends, as well as a recent friendship that pushed him to reconsider how new connections are formed, he shares fresh insights on what it means to sustain and make friendships.
Dr. Michael Gerson is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC), Associate Professor in the Sport and Performance Psychology graduate program at National University, and adjunct instructor at Menlo College. His work focuses on elite mindsets, optimal performance, mindfulness, mentorship, and transformative life skills.Dr. Gerson is the owner of Transcend Performance and co-author of the bestselling book Deliberate Discomfort: How U.S. Special Operations Forces Overcome Fear and Dare to Win by Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable. Previously, he served as a Senior Performance Enhancement Specialist for the U.S. Army, working with Special Forces Operators, snipers, drill sergeant leaders, and military police, and later as Director of Sport Psychology for the Seattle Mariners.
A longtime meditation practitioner and international presenter, he serves as Coordinator of the Mindfulness Special Interest Group for the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP).
The Spirit in Which We Show Up- explores a simple but often overlooked question: not just what are we trying to accomplish, but how do we want to show up while doing it? Drawing from mindfulness, performance psychology, and everyday life, Dr. Michael Gerson explores how pressure, distraction, and our own mental habits can pull us away from what matters—and how learning to notice, return, and choose can help us reconnect. Through brief interactive “Dharma Drills,” the talk invites us to practice bringing greater presence, intention, and humanity to the ordinary moments that ultimately shape our lives.
Sandra Acuna is an International Student from Mexico City pursuing a B.S. in Finance. Her college experience has been shaped by leadership, curiosity, and a desire to create meaningful change. She serves as the Director of Finance for Menlo College Student Government, Vice President of the Investing Club and the Women in Leadership Development (WILD) Club. Outside of Menlo, Sandra has worked in client success and fulfillment at a Fit-Tech startup, while also maintaining a strong commitment to Model United Nations, where she has served as a Chair and published research on pressing global issues.
Across these experiences, Sandra has become especially interested in the gap between being given an opportunity and actually being equipped to take advantage of it. She believes that young people are often told to “wait their turn” before their ideas are taken seriously. Her experiences have led her to question that assumption. She is passionate about exploring how young people can use the influence they already have, from the organizations they lead to the choices they make to create meaningful change.
She has experienced what it means to learn while simultaneously being trusted with real responsibility. Her perspective is rooted in the belief that meaningful change does not require a certain age, title, or position. You just have to start.
Sandra’s talk explores the power of ethical consumption — how the tiny choices we make every day quietly shape industries, incentives, and the systems we move through. It pushes past the idea that buying is just buying, and reframes our decisions as pressure points for transparency, accountability, and real change.
Sophia Francesca Dizon is a first-generation accounting student who serves as Student Body President, and is an incoming Deloitte Audit & Assurance intern who shows high-stakes execution and compassionate leadership belong together. Driven by a passion for project management and event operations, she bridges student advocacy with administrative strategy through Student Government. Furthermore, within Menlo’s Career Services, she directs operations for large-scale campus career fair events. Sophia mobilizes blood drives as a Red Cross Student Ambassador, champions cultural representation on the Asian Cultural Engagement and Support Club board, and gives voice to female leaders as Head Editor of the Women in Leadership Development Club’s newsletter. In her TEDx Talk, she explores how volunteering teaches us to be selfless, compassionate, and intentional, proving that showing up for others beyond ourselves is how we become good leaders and sustain what truly matters.
Sophia explores how volunteering teaches us to be selfless, compassionate, and intentional. Drawing from her experiences in volunteer service and event operations, she demonstrates how stepping beyond ourselves serves as a foundational blueprint for effective leadership. Sophia makes a compelling case that showing up for others is the key to creating sustainable impact and protecting what truly matters in our careers and communities.
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