NEW YORK, Nov. 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- TED, the nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, today announces the newest class of 21 new TED Fellows and 12 TED Senior Fellows. This diverse group of innovators, representing 18 countries and multiple disciplines, will join the global TED community at TED2013 in Long Beach, CA, to catapult their work to the international stage.

The TED2013 Fellows and Senior Fellows include an electrical engineer who created a macroscopic invisibility cloak for visible light; a sound artist and composer who strives to reclaim ownership of sound; and a medical device innovator whose company tests for anemia in pregnant women using light, without drawing blood. Please see below for the full list of TED2013 Fellows and Senior Fellows.

Now in its fourth year, the TED Fellows program hand-picks courageous, accomplished young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work, which ranges widely from open science to new media art to social entrepreneurship. By bringing Fellows to the TED stage -- both literally and figuratively -- the program helps amplify the impact of their initiatives and supports their quest to affect the world in the most positive way. To date, the program has honored more than 300 Fellows from more than 75 countries from thousands of applications around the world.

"The TED Fellows program has given an international stage to people and to stories we might never have otherwise heard," said Tom Rielly, director of the program. "For example, Max Little created technology that detects Parkinson's disease through audio tests on ordinary phone calls. He used the platform offered by TEDGlobal to grow his sample database against which he compares voice samples from zero to 17,000 in half the time expected. Whether it is a medical device innovator, a data visualization scientist redefining their field or an astrobiologist studying exoplanets, being part of TED offers Fellows a groundswell of support for their world-changing work."

TED will begin accepting submissions for the next class of TED Fellows on May 28, 2013. The program seeks individuals aged 21 to 45 (though anyone over 18 is eligible) who show remarkable achievement in their fields of endeavor. It targets applicants from Asia-Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but welcomes candidates from anywhere. Please visit http://www.ted.com/pages/fellows-applying to learn more about the application process.

TED2013 Fellows

Alicia Eggert (USA) - Interdisciplinary artist
American interdisciplinary artist whose work primarily takes the form of kinetic, electronic and interactive sculpture.

Antonio Torres (Mexico) - Architect + naturalist     
Mexican artist, architect and co-founder of The Bittertang Farm, a small design farm that/which explores expressions and sensations through media and architecture.

Baile Zhang (China | Singapore) - Electrical engineer         
Chinese electrical engineer and physicist who has created the first macroscopic invisibility cloak.

Ben Burke (USA) - Writer, performer + designer
American interdisciplinary artist, puppeteer, junkyard tinkerer and co-founder of Apocalypse Puppet Theater and the Stars & Garters Theater Company.

Christine Sun Kim (USA) - Sound artist + composer         
Korean-American artist and educator who uses the medium of sound through technology to investigate and rationalize her relationship with sound and spoken languages.

Cyrus Kabiru (Kenya) - Found object artist 
Kenyan self-taught painter and sculptor who primarily uses junk materials to make his works, including striking eyewear.

David Lang (USA) - Maker + writer
American co-founder of OpenROV, a community of DIY ocean explorers and developers of low-cost, open-source underwater robots.

Edwyn "Eddie" Huang (USA | Taiwan) - Writer, host + chef          
Taiwanese-American owner and head chef of Baohaus in NYC, a Taiwanese street-food restaurant inspired by youth culture and hip hop.

Jinha Lee (South Korea) - Inventor + interaction researcher          
South Korean inventor and interaction researcher who explores new ways to leverage physical space and objects to interface with the digital world.

Kibwe Tavares (UK) - Filmmaker + architect         
British filmmaker and co-founder of Factory Fifteen, a film and animation studio exploring new methods of visual storytelling.

Kitra Cahana (Canada) - Photographer       
Canadian photographer who has spent the past three years researching and documenting nomadic youth identities in the United States.

Louisa Preston (UK) - Astrobiologist
British astrobiologist and planetary geologist studying life in Earth's most extreme environments, hoping to someday find life on Mars.

Miriah Meyer (USA) - Science visualization designer         
American designer who creates interactive visualization systems that help scientists make sense of complex data.

Mohammad Herzallah (Palestine) - Neuroscientist
Founder of the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative, working to create an infrastructure for neuroscience research and to train the next generation of neuroscientists in Palestine.

Negin Farsad (USA | Iran) - Comedian + filmmaker
Iranian-American stand-up comedian and filmmaker currently working on "The Muslims are Coming!", a film that follows Muslim-American comedians on the road as they perform, meet locals and counter Islamophobia.

Paul Wicks (UK) - Medical architect
British medical entrepreneur and lead scientist for PatientsLikeMe, an online community allowing people living with medical conditions to track their illnesses, share their experiences and contribute to research.

Renee Hlozek (South Africa | USA) - Cosmologist
South African cosmologist working to better understand the initial conditions of the universe – the tiny fluctuations that grew to be the large structures we see today, such as galaxies.

Ryan Holladay (USA) - Musical artist
American artist and co-founder of BLUEBRAIN, a music and technology duo creating site-specific sound experiments, interactive concerts and film scoring.

Safwat Saleem (Pakistan | USA) - Graphic designer + satirist        
Pakistani graphic designer, filmmaker and artist who uses humor to tell stories of people (and creatures) who have the odds stacked against them.

Shivani Siroya (USA | India) - Mobile finance entrepreneur
Indian-American founder and CEO of InVenture, a mobile technology company creating a text-messaging platform that provides credit scores and accounting tools to anyone with a mobile phone.

Tunde Jegede (Nigeria | UK) - Composer  
UK-based composer, producer, cellist and kora (African harp) player who fuses Western classical music with African traditions.

2013 TED Senior Fellows

Julie Freeman (UK) - Artist
UK based artist combining science, technology, and natural systems, in order to create work that questions how we translate nature.

Ayah Bdeir (Lebanon | US) - Engineer + artist         
Lebanese artist, inventor and founder of littleBits, an open-source system of pre-assembled circuits that snap together with magnets – making learning about electronics fun, easy and creative.

Asha de Vos (Sri Lanka) - Blue whale scientist       
Sri Lankan cetologist, oceanographer, and PhD candidate studying the unique and unusual population of non-migrating blue whales found only in the Northern Indian Ocean

Camille Seaman (US) - Polar photographer
Native American photographer whose work captures the harsh beauty of remote Arctic landscapes.

Genevieve von Petzinger (Canada) - Cave art researcher         
Canadian doctoral candidate studying ancient geometric signs from the Ice Age.

Lucianne Walkowicz (US) - Stellar astronomer      
Postdoctoral fellow studying the effects of stellar activity on exoplanets with the Kepler Mission.

Greg Gage (US) - DIY neuroscientist          
DIY neuroscientist and co-founder of Backyard Brains, an organization teaching kids neuroscience through experiments with robotic control of ordinary cockroaches.

Kaustuv de Biswas (India | US) - Digital community builder           
Indian design entrepreneur and creator of Sunglass, a cloud-based 3D platform that enables artists and engineers to build things together, regardless of location or device.

Boniface Mwangi (Kenya) - Photo activist
Kenyan photojournalist and founder of Picha Mtaani, a youth-led national reconciliation initiative in Kenya, and Pawa254, a collaborative space for creatives in Nairobi.

Myshkin Ingawale (India) - Medical device innovator          
Founder of Biosense Technologies, an Indian medical device company that has created a low-cost instrument that tests for anemia using light, without the need to draw blood.

Angelo Vermeulen (Belgium) - Artist + scientist     
Visual artist, biologist, space researcher and community organiser who creates large-scale collaborative art installations. Currently crew commander of the NASA-funded HI-SEAS Mars simulation in Hawaii.

Lars Jan (US) - Director + media artist
Founder of Early Morning Opera, a genre-bending art lab creating works that chart constellations of ideas using technically innovative live performance, as well as through traditional and emerging media. 

About the TED Fellows program
The TED Fellows program hand-picks courageous, accomplished young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work. Among many diverse accomplishments, TED Fellows have developed a technology to detect Parkinson's disease through phone calls, used bacteria to "grow" their own clothing and launched an app that helps people around the world crowdsource crisis information.

Founded in 2009, the TED Fellows program offers full participation in the TED2013 conference, a three-day pre-conference of workshops and activities, ongoing professional coaching and mentoring through the SupporTED program and active participation in the TED community through the Fellows network (fellows.ted.com), TED Fellows blog and TEDx events. The program is made possible by the visionary support of the Bezos family, the Harnisch Foundation, the Dhanam Foundation, the Arcus Foundation and numerous private donors.

Learn more about the TED Fellows:
Website: http://www.ted.com/fellows
Email: fellows@ted.com
Twitter: @tedfellow
Facebook: facebook.com/TEDFellow
YouTube: youtube.com/tedfellowstalks

About TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 25 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. The annual TED conference invites the world's leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes, and their talks are then made available for free at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The annual TED conference takes place each spring in Long Beach, California, along with the TEDActive simulcast in Palm Springs; the annual TEDGlobal is held each summer in Edinburgh, Scotland.

TED's media initiatives include TED.com, where new TEDTalks are posted daily, the recently launched TED-Ed platform for students and educators, the Open Translation Project, which provides subtitles and interactive transcripts as well as the ability for any TEDTalk to be translated by volunteers worldwide, and TEDBooks, short e-books by speakers that elaborate on a single idea originally presented on TED's stage. TED has established the annual TED Prize, where exceptional individuals with a wish to change the world are given the opportunity to put their wishes into action; TEDx, which offers individuals or groups a way to host local, self-organized events around the world, and the TED Fellows program, helping world-changing innovators from around the globe to become part of the TED community and, with its help, amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities. Follow TED on Twitter at @TEDNews, or on Facebook at facebook.com/TED.

Contact Ben Kellogg: ben@bwkny.com, 212-392-4949

SOURCE TED