What do a third-year medical student, professor of cyber forensics and local singer-songwriter have in common? All will be presenting March 6 at Marshall’s TEDx event.
Following the success of the 2025 event, TEDxMarshallU is continuing with a bold, versatile theme: Inspired Independence. The evening will highlight stories of strength, ingenuity and passion from successful and diverse speakers.
Piper Cook, the communications director for TEDxMarshallU, expects the theme to invoke a variety of stories and interpretations.
“We landed on Inspired Independence, and we really wanted our speakers to explore what it means to be independent, and so we are really leaning into this inspired independence that is rooted in strength, leadership, ingenuity and bravery,” Cook said.
Each of the eight speakers will be representing their own journey of inspired independence, traversing many contrasting landscapes and histories, Cook said. The event will also include a performance by community band Hoot & Holler, introducing live music to the stage. Cook hopes the diversity will widen the scope of the theme.
“We want to explore the same common thread throughout different backgrounds and see what it can mean to be independent in different ways,” Cook said. “We have students, we have professionals in medicine, we have a fashion brand consultant and breast cancer survivor speaking.”
In building off the momentum of last year — TEDxMarshallU’s most attended event to date — the TEDx team has welcomed several popular names, including Huntington local Erica Deligne.
Deligne is a fashion and brand consultant, breast cancer survivor and advocate of women’s health and beauty. After years in the fashion and retail industry, she began a fashion blog in 2014 to express her own fashion tips and techniques. She was later diagnosed with breast cancer and decided to go flat in 2021. After dealing with barriers to proper education and treatment risks, Deligne set out to inform other women using her own treatment experiences.
Since then, her blog has grown into a platform of education and empowerment for women facing breast cancer and mastectomy.
“My blog combines my fashion and styling,” Deligne said. “We’re targeting towards flat women now, since I’m now flat, but also as an education piece for women to learn more when they’re presented with a breast cancer diagnosis, so they have all the information and feel empowered to ask the questions that are necessary.”
For her talk in March, Deligne will be approaching the theme through her own lens of self-determination and personal truth.
“I think inspired independence is very much knowing who you are as a person and being able to have self-reflection. You’re inspired by your independence to make the decision that aligns best with your spirit,” Deligne said. “That’s very much in alignment with what led me to do more research before I made my final decision when I was faced with breast cancer because I felt in my gut that this decision to reconstruct wasn’t right for me; I did more research.”
TEDxMarshallU will be hosting Deligne and the other seven speakers March 6 from 7-9 p.m. in the Joan C. Edwards Playhouse. Tickets are on sale through the TEDxMarshallU website; student tickets are $5, and adult tickets are $20.
Claire Johnson can be contacted at [email protected].
