Jaylen Brown in conversation with David Sun Kong.

At 23, Jaylen Brown is a rising star in the NBA with the Boston Celtics and also an activist and advocate for social justice and education reform. In this conversation, Jaylen is joined by Dr. David Sun Kong, Director of the MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative, to share his educational journey and how he hopes to make an impact on our education system. Jaylen also discusses his vision for a new learning initiative he is developing in collaboration with David and MIT. Jaylen Brown is an American professional basketball player for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He played one year of college basketball for the University of California Golden Bears, being named firstteam AllPac12 and Pac12 Freshman of the Year. Declaring for the 2016 NBA draft after that season, he was selected by the Celtics with the third overall pick. As a professional, he has split his time between shooting guard and small forward.

David Sun Kong, Ph.D. is a Synthetic Biologist, community organizer, musician, and photographer based in Lexington, MA. He is the Director of the MIT Media Lab's new Community Biotechnology Initiative. Our mission: empowering communities through biotechnology.

David conducted his graduate studies at MIT’s Media Lab, receiving a Master's degree for developing technology for printing nanostructures with energetic beams and a Ph.D. for demonstrating the first gene synthesis in a microfluidic (“labonachip”) system. He was recognized as an emerging leader in synthetic biology as a "LEAP" fellow, served as a guest faculty member at the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole, MA, and is cofounder and managing faculty of "How To Grow (Almost) Anything," an international course on synthetic biology. He founded and chaired new Microfluidic and Hardware Tracks for the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition (iGEM) and is the official iGEM DJ. He was Technical Staff in the Bioengineering Systems & Technologies group at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and a founding member of the synthetic biology team. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx