Our featured speakers today are Sara Gombash Lampe and Kevin McClatchey. Read their bios below. Visit tedx.osu.edu to purchase your ticket before they sell out! You can also see our full speaker lineup here.

Dr. Sara Gombash Lampe is a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University who has expertise in neurodegenerative, neuromuscular, and neuroimmune diseases. Prior to graduate school, Sara attended Baldwin-Wallace University, where she majored in Neuroscience and Biology. During that time she studied memory conditioning and extinction and neuroplasticity after limb loss. She graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a Ph.D. in neuroscience, where she specialized in aging, Parkinson’s disease, and gene therapy research. She completed her research as a student scholar at Michigan State University and was awarded a pre-doctoral Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award. Her interest in gene therapy carried her into her first postdoctoral fellowship, where she studied nervous system and gastrointestinal tract function in a pediatric neuromuscular disease called Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Further, she used the nervous system in the gut to investigate what could be happening in the central nervous system in disease and developed novel methods of gene delivery to neurons in the gastrointestinal tract of multiple species. During her research, she was the recipient of two NIH-funded training fellowships, was awarded an Emerging Investigator Award from the FightSMA foundation, and received distinguished research awards at conferences recognizing her work.

In her current postdoctoral position, she studies risk factors and neuronal function in multiple sclerosis. Sara has a deep passion for sharing her knowledge with students in the form of teaching and mentoring. She is currently a lecturer in undergraduate neuroscience courses and teaches her own course on the History of Neuroscience. She is a member of the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience and Nu Rho Psi. Additionally, Sara teaches neuroscience courses to senior citizens at Central Ohio Technical College. While she is sciencing as fast as she can, she also enjoys masters swimming and kissing cats.


Kevin McClatchy is a faculty member in the Department of Theatre at The Ohio State University and the Director of the OSU Shakespeare and Autism Project. He has also been a professional actor for more than twenty years. Originally from Philadelphia, he attended Washington and Lee University, where he earned a degree in Journalism and English and played basketball. He also has an MFA in Acting from Ohio State. Kevin had never acted or even seen a professional production of a play until he moved to New York just prior to his 24th birthday. From his first real theater experience — seeing the original cast of Lanford Wilson’s play Burn This — to today, Kevin has felt privileged to be part of acting and teaching communities. Kevin and his wife Lisa have been married for 23 years and they have two children, Eirann and Kavanagh.