Melinda Latour is Rumsey Family Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Arts, and Assistant Professor of Musicology at Tufts University. A scholar of early music and contemporary popular music, Latour has recently finished her first monograph, The Voice of Virtue: Moral Song and the Practice of French Stoicism, 1574-1652, which is in production with Oxford University Press and slated for a 2022 release. She has also published an edited collection (co-edited with Robert Fink and Zachary Wallmark), The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society. Latour’s scholarship has appeared in Music and Letters (2021), the Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music (2018), the Revue de musicologie (2016), and the Journal of Musicology (2015). Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A native Californian, Latour earned a Ph.D. in Musicology from UCLA in 2016, an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from UC Riverside in 2009, and a B.A. from UC Berkeley in 2002. She has received a range of prestigious awards and fellowships, including an American Council of Learned Societes Fellowship (2019-20), a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2018), and an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, held in residency at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours, France (2015-16). She is delighted to share her passion for the intersection of music and philosophy for the Tedx community.

Dr. Amutah-Onukagha is the Julia A. Okoro Professor of Black Maternal Health in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Her current research interests include maternal health disparities, reproductive health and social justice, infant mortality and HIV/AIDS in Black women. Dr. Amutah-Onukagha also serves as the inaugural Assistant Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Public Health and Professional Degree Programs.

Ndidiamaka is the Principal Investigator of two multi-year studies on maternal mortality and morbidity, an R01 funded by National Institutes of Health and an interdisciplinary grant on health equity funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Additionally, she is a member of the MA-COVID 19 Maternal Equity Coalition and was honored with the American Public Health Association’s Maternal and Child Health Section’s Young Professional of the Year Award in 2019. She is in the 2020-2021 class of the top 40 under 40 Minority Leaders in Healthcare, an annual award given out by the National Minority Quality Forum. Ndidiamaka is a life-long member of the American Public Health Association and is currently the co-chair of the Perinatal and Women's Health committee in the Maternal and Child Health section. Finally, Dr. Amutah-Onukagha is the Founder and Director of the Maternal Outcomes for Translational Health Equity Research Lab, (MOTHER) a research lab comprised of 35 students from undergrad to postdoc with a keen interest in reducing maternal health disparities as experienced by Black women.

Nick Dorian is an ecologist, an educator, and a naturalist. He is a PhD student in Biology at Tufts University where he studies how solitary bees—those that don’t live in hives—cope with rapidly changing environments. Nick also co-founded and runs the Tufts Pollinator Initiative, which works to conserve urban pollinators through habitat creation, community & undergraduate education, and ecological research.

Shania Cox is a freshman at Tufts University. As an autistic person, she has experienced many situations in which her identity was questioned. She believed that a big reason for this was the stereotypical representations of autistic people in the media. This is what sparked the idea for her TED talk. Through her talk, she hopes to challenge the current media that exists regarding autism and make people question the media that they are absorbing. Beyond her talk, Shania hopes to continue advocating for autistic voices during her time at Tufts and as a potential career venture.