TEDxBinghamtonUniversity will be holding its first in-person event in two years this March.

TEDxBinghamtonUniversity’s 12th-annual conference will be held in the Osterhout Concert Theater in the Anderson Center for the Performing Arts on March 27, featuring several student and professional speakers, interactive exhibits and performances. TEDx is a licensed independent group branching from the nonprofit organization TED, and gives speakers from local areas a platform to share their ideas among their community. TEDxBinghamtonUniversity is largely a student-led initiative, with five student directors who work with Betsy Staff, TEDx license holder and director of new student programs at BU. The event is also supported by student volunteers, a student graphic designer and several local speakers.

This year’s conference is themed “Welcome to Tomorrow,” an ode to the “new normal” many have acclimated to due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Sofia Fasullo, director of experience for TEDxBinghamtonUniversity and a senior double-majoring in statistics and geography, TEDxBinghamtonUniversity wants its audience to leave feeling more secure in this new reality.

“We at TEDxBinghamtonUniversity hope that by sharing the unique experiences of our speakers, our audience will gain insight into the steps people in various fields are taking to move toward a better future,” Fasullo said.

Before the event and during intermissions there will be photo booths, 3D printing, a meet and greet and a performance from the Binghamton University Flow Arts Club. There will also be a fencing demonstration from a BU Fencing Club member and speaker Courtney Hurley, an Olympic fencer. The event itself will feature selectively chosen speakers and artists, including Hurley, Greg Hill, a professional skier, Camille Thurman, a jazz musician and Paul Turner, the Rachel Carson professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University. The speeches will each be between 10 to 18 minutes long and will cover topics ranging from Olympian culture to community violence.

Turner said he decided to participate in this TEDx talk because he felt it was necessary to communicate the importance of science in a way that is palatable for wide audiences. His speech will be focusing on the antibiotic resistance crisis that has been affecting countries across the globe and bacteriophage, also known as phages, which are viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria.

“We have an innovative update to classic phage therapy, where we discover novel phages in the wild that bind to structures of bacteria that are important in causing disease,” Turner wrote in an email. “This innovative approach should be more effective in the long term; we not only kill the bacteria in the classic sense, but also use particular phages to select for the inevitable evolution of phage resistance that pushes the bacteria to suffer trade-offs that reduce pathogenicity.”

Emily Wiesenfeld, a volunteer for the event and sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering, said she is looking forward to hearing Turner’s speech.

“The thing I am most excited for during the event is Paul Turner’s talk,” Wiesenfeld said. “I have always been interested in science and medicine, and his research on the evolutionary genetics of viruses particularly sparked my interest.”

There will also be two student speakers — Elisheva Ezor, a sophomore double-majoring in mathematics and business administration, and Casey Boston, a graduate student pursuing a master’s in social work, as well as an alumni speaker, Daniel Adeyanju, ‘14.

Ezor’s brother, Eitan Ezor, a senior majoring in computer science, was a student speaker during last year’s conference, which was held online. Ezor said her brother was one of her largest inspirations for applying, but it had been her dream to apply to the conference since middle school. Growing up having to battle for better accessibility in schools, Ezor plans to use her speech to inspire the audience to make the changes they would like to see in themselves.

“My speech is about my experiences with dyslexia and activism and how I motivate myself to overcome feelings of fear in the face of change I think needs to happen,” Ezor said. “I want to give everyone the best foundation to form a future that they are happy with and be able to revolutionize their future in the way they want.”

The conference will be held March 27 from 12:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Tickets are discounted for students and can be found here.