TEDxSMU 2014 will feature a day-long lineup of speakers, performers and musicians who will riff on this year’s theme of “Strangely Familiar.”

The program includes a light breakfast, lunch, snacks and the conversation breaks that are the hallmark of the TEDxSMU experience.

Speakers will include:

• Deborah Clegg, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center nutritionist and a former member of the Army team that develops MRE’s (meals ready to eat).
• Artist Janeil Engelstadt
• Howard Goldthwaite, a banjo player who says the movie Deliverance turned people like him into social outcasts.
• Greg Harris, President and CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
• Larry Hass, associate dean at the McBride Magic and Mystery School in Las Vegas
• Kevin Judice, Founder of K2 Therapeutics
• Alexander McLean, founder of the Africa Prisons Project, a Uganda-based organization working to improve the lives of men, women, and children living in African prisons.
• Megna Murali, a sophomore at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts
• Satya Nitta, who works with Watson, the famous IBM supercomputer, as manager of the Emerging Technologies Research Group at IBM’s TJ Watson research Center.
• Kelly Stoetzel, director of content for TED and the longtime host of TEDxSMU with slam poet Rives.