2025 Creativity Conference Speakers

Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Vint Cerf has the Turing Award (the “Nobel Prize for computing”) for co-inventing the internet—indeed, he coined the word “internet”—and his current job title is  Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

Work by Rita Colwell, the first woman to head the National Science Foundation, bridges many academic fields from oceanography to genetics, and her revolutionary discoveries have prevented countless of people from suffering with cholera.

Philosopher, novelist, MacArthur Fellow and National Medal of the Humanities winner Rebecca Goldstein, author of “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away,” pursues human drives to find out what it is in life that matters.

Curator Emerita of Contemporary Design at Cooper-Hewitt, the Smithsonian museum of design, and Director of the Center for Design Thinking at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ellen Lupton investigates how graphic design affects our daily lives.

Mark Moffett, tropical explorer and biologist, has been investigating the life and death of societies across the animal world and in humans right up to the present day, traveling with globe with the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing made the best seller lists for over 150 months, making it one of the most successful novels of all time; she is also a significant conservationist, writing Cry of the Kalahari and other books about her studies in Africa.

Recipient of the Golden Plate award from the American Academy of Achievement, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has changed how we think about humankind with such bestselling books as The Language Instinct and Enlightenment Now.

Returning Creativity Conference favorite Apollo Robbins, expert on pickpockets, confidence crimes, and deception, “widely considered the best in the world at what he does” (New Yorker), will be joined by the magician and mentalist Ava Do.

Former chief economist at the World Bank, the 2018 Nobel laureate Paul Romer is widely known for his “economics of ideas,” a novel perspective concerning how human knowledge and innovations contribute to economic growth and prosperity.

Frank Sulloway is widely known for work on the effect of birth order on personality, but he has also done extensive research in evolutionary biology, especially about the Galapagos islands, and has just finished a book on Darwin’s Origin of Species.

A second returning Creativity Conference favorite, the MacArthur-winner Patricia Wright, updates us on her continuing efforts of conserve the lemurs of Madagascar, and will report on several extraordinary new discoveries from that island nation.