Night of Ideas

Jean-Emmanuel Bibault is a professor of Radiation Oncology and AI expert, he’s on a mission to transform cancer care with cutting-edge technology. His work bridges artificial intelligence and real-world medicine, making groundbreaking research accessible to patients. After a postdoc at Stanford’s AI in Medicine Lab, he became a full professor in Paris, leading innovative projects at the crossroads of oncology and AI. He’s also an entrepreneur, co-founding jaide, a startup revolutionizing healthcare with AI.

A bestselling author, his books 2041, the Odyssey of Medicine and Cancer Confidential explore how AI is reshaping medicine. In 2025, he was named a Next Gen Leader, recognizing him as one of the top 10 French innovators under 45 shaping the future of healthcare.

Born in Tehran, Sepideh Farsi moved to Paris to study mathematics, but soon shifted to filmmaking. After directing several short films, her documentary Homi Sethna Filmmaker won multiple awards. Her first two feature films, Dreams of Dust and The Gaze, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival. In 2017, her documentary 7 Veils won the Grand Prix at the Marseille International Film Festival. In 2019, she filmed I Will Cross Tomorrow in Greece. Her latest animated feature, La Sirène, opened the Berlinale (Panorama) and has since won around a dozen awards, including the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Animated Film and Best Music at Annecy.

(Photo credit: Aris Ramos)

Yann Mirada, born in 1988, is a French cabinetmaker and designer based in Saint-Malo (France). He won the Prix de perfectionnement aux métiers d'art de la Ville de Paris in 2019 and the Villa Albertine in 2025. His work is guided by a deep desire to observe, deconstruct, understand and design. Through his creations, which can be manipulated and modulated, he seeks to express in three dimensions an attachment to the tangible that has accompanied him since childhood. He collects and questions the structure of objects, tools and furniture, as well as elements of the organic world such as plants and skeletons. This instinctive curiosity has led him to Design and Arts & Crafts. The boundaries that separate them are permeable and depend on everyone's interpretation, so his practice is based on the porosity of these two disciplines. His work is characterized by handcrafted production, with the emphasis on a sober, sincere aesthetic and pure forms where raw materials and visible structure intertwine. The object is revealed as it is: its design becomes an aesthetic force and an opportunity to hybridize materials.

(Photo credit: Emmanuelle Descraques)

Rich Wilson grew up in Boston and learned how to sail in Marblehead. He earned degrees at Harvard, MIT, and Harvard Business School, and has received an Honorary Doctorate in Public Administration from Massachusetts Maritime Academy. He taught math in the Boston Public Schools, was a defense analyst in Washington DC, and worked at Wind Ship Development. Along the way, he continued sailing, becoming the youngest winning skipper of the Newport-Bermuda Race in 1980. In 1990, Rich founded sitesALIVE!, school programs that connect K12 classrooms to adventures and expeditions worldwide. By his voyages, as well as partnerships with field schools worldwide, sitesALIVE! has produced 76 live, interactive, full semester programs for K12 schools globally. Following this mission, the primary objective of sailing the Vendée Globe was to create a global school program off that uniquely global ocean event.   

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-founded and co-directs the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Banerjee is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. He is a co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economy for his groundbreaking work in development economics research. Abhijit is the author of a large number of articles and six books, including Poor Economics, Good Economics for Hard Times, both co-authored with Esther Duflo.

(Photo credit: Bryce Vickmark)

Esther Duflo is a French American Economist, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds the Chaire Pauvreté et Politiques Publiques at the Collège de France. She co-founded and co-directs the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of people living in poverty, with the aim of designing and evaluating social policies. After earning degrees in history and economics from École Normale Supérieure, she completed her Ph.D. at MIT in 1999. Esther Duflo has received numerous prestigious awards, including the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, and the John Bates Clark Medal. She has co-authored influential books like Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

(Photo credit: Bryce Vickmark)

Mohamed Amer Meziane is a philosopher and intellectual historian. After teaching at Columbia University, he joined Brown University as an Assistant Professor in the Francophone Studies department. He teaches Western and non-Western Philosophy as well as Francophone Literature from North Africa and the Caribbean. He is the author of two books: The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization published by Verso Books (Des empires sous la terre in French) and Au bord des mondes: Vers une anthropologie métaphysique. The first book won the Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023. Mohamed Amer Meziane gives lectures regularly at Harvard University, the Collège de France and MoMa PS1, and his work has been reviewed in media such as Le Monde and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also the winner of the Salomon Prize and the author of several texts for contemporary artists.

A philosopher, Vinciane Despret has taught at the University of Liège and the Free University of Brussels. Passionate about ethology, she has published numerous works questioning the practice of knowing with animals, including La danse du cratérope écaillé; Quand le loup habitera avec l'agneau; What would animals say if we asked the right questions? and Living as a Bird. She has also conducted this type of investigation among humans, notably with Ces émotions qui nous fabriquent (1999); Our Grateful dead: stories of those left behind (2015) and Les morts à l'œuvre (2023). Many of these works have been translated. In 2021, she turned to fiction with Autobiographie d'un poulpe et autres récits d'anticipation. Most recently, she collaborated with Belgian cartoonist Pierre Kroll on a comic strip, published in 2024: Dieu, Darwin, tout et n'importe quoi.

(Photo credit: Michel Houet)

David Sittenfeld serves as Director for the Center for the Environment at the Museum of Science, Boston where he has worked for over 25 years, leading the Museum’s work on projects for NOAA, NASA, NSF, DOE, the Sloan Foundation, and the United Nations. He co-led the NOAA-funded Citizen Science, Civics and Resilient Communities and Science Center Public Forums projects, which implemented science-to-civics activities at 30 US science centers on extreme heat, drought, extreme precipitation, and sea level rise. David led the Wicked Hot Boston and Wicked Hot Mystic projects which identified heat and air quality related vulnerabilities in over 20 communities in Greater Boston through community-engaged participatory science and is a member of the leadership team for the NOAA-funded Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring. David holds a PhD from Northeastern University, where he researched participatory methods and geospatial modeling for public engagement about climate-related hazards.

Bruno Perreau is the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Faculty Affiliate at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (Harvard University). He is the founding chair of MIT’s Center of Excellence in French Studies. Bruno Perreau is the author of thirteen books on French and US institutions, bioethics, family policies, queer cultures, minority politics, and contemporary theories of justice, among which The Politics of Adoption (MIT Press, 2014), Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford University Press, 2016), Les Défis de la République (with Joan W. Scott, Presses de Sciences Po, 2017), and Sphères d’injustice. Pour un universalisme minoritaire (La Découverte, 2023) forthcoming in English as Spheres of Injustice. The Ethical Promise of Minority Presence (MIT Press, April 8th, 2025).

Vincent Pons is a Professor at Harvard Business School and a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Economics department. He studied economics and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and received a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In his research, he examines the foundations of democracy: how democratic systems function, and how they can be improved. He received the 2023 Best Young French Economist Award. He is also a cofounder of the company Explain.

Zakiyyah is an artist-changemaker who utilizes music and visual media to explore themes that centralize marginalized communities via her production company, Black and Bold Productions. As an actress and classically-trained singer who is well-versed in Opera, Hip-Hop, Jazz, and R&B, she employs her extremely versatile skill-set to reach a broad range of audiences and craft a sound that is uniquely her own--including her most well-known, "Hip-Hopera". She’s had the pleasure of bringing these sounds to numerous audiences from the House of Blues to the United Nations. In addition to her artistic practice, Zakiyyah has served as an educator, teaching voice through the Hamilton Garrett Music and Arts Academy and Harvard’s Holden Voice Program. Zakiyyah worked as a racial equity consultant with Arts Connect International, helping arts organizations reassess their practices through the lens of equity and creative justice. She currently provides workshops on Creative Disruption at various schools and organizations throughout New England. Her Tedx Talk, “Being Good Is a Privilege” highlights the repercussions of overlooking class in our quest for social change. Zakiyyah's upcoming album, African Import, provides a window into both the beauty and complexity of the black diaspora, and the significance of its consumption by mainstream society.

Cristela Guerra is a senior arts and culture reporter at WBUR in Boston, a queer Panamanian journalist of color, and a moderator who facilitates and leads conversations around race, identity, and equity. Before working in public radio, she was a newspaper journalist for more than a decade, working at The Boston Globe and The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida. She is one of 24 journalists from around the world selected for the 2024 class of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Her work received a regional and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2014 and most recently received another regional Edward R. Murrow in 2023 as part of “Continuing Coverage” for her work at the U.S.-Mexico border on the journey of Venezuelans migrants. She was chosen as a 2019 Latina Leader by Amplify Latinx and selected by YW Boston to be inducted into its 2023 Academy of Women Achievers and receive the organization’s Sylvia Ferrell-Jones Award. They are the vice-president of the New England Chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and vice-chair of the board at RAW Art Works.