2026 Creativity Conference Speakers

Honored for his conservation efforts by the United Nations, George Archibald, the highly decorated founder of the International Crane Foundation, famously began his vast efforts by helping rescue the whooping crane from the brink of extinction.

MacArthur fellow Bonnie Bassler studies how microorganisms collaborate in making decisions, allowing whole populations, at times made up of multiple species, to create complex, versatile communities—and how we might control their ill effects.

Inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, American Book Award winner Jericho Brown is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets whose poems the MacArthur Foundation describes as achieving an “astonishing lyrical beauty.”

Cosmologist and philosopher Sean Carroll has made diverse contributions to physics while being widely lauded for his podcast Mindscape and many popular works, including such books as Something Deeply Hidden and The Biggest Ideas in the Universe.

Inventor and engineer Larry Howell uses pop-up, origami and flexible mechanisms to fundamentally re-imagine how machines should function in building devices for hospitals, NASA researchers, the U.S. Department of Defense, and many others.

Pioneer psychologist and neuroscientist Charan Ranganath, author of the recent bestseller “Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory,” looks at memory as an implement we use to plot the course of our lives.

Member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe, Wendy Red Star is a MacArthur-winning artist who explores colonialism in her work, using multiple media to address Native American life both with respect to the past and in contemporary culture.

The Italian architect, engineer, author, and urban planner Carlo Ratti focuses on the intersection between natural and artificial worlds in his exploration at MIT on how technologies will change how we design and ultimately live together in cities.

Yale physician and best-selling author Lisa Sanders writes the “Diagnosis” column for the New York Times, and oversaw, and hosted, the series with that name on Netflix, which focused on traumatic medical cases no one had been able to solve.

Charlie Rice won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the virus causing Hepatitis C, an accomplishment that the Nobel committee wrote “made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives.”