A first-generation American immigrant, turned American soldier, combat veteran, and now a professional touring stand-up comedian, Thom Tran turned a literal lifetime of war and tragedy into a successful comedy career. On 3 April 2003, his 4th day in Iraq, during a gunfight Thom was struck in the back of the head by a sniper’s bullet. On April 3, 2003, his 4th day in Iraq, during a gunfight Thom was struck in the back of the head by a sniper’s bullet. Since starting his comedy career, Thom created the GIs of Comedy tour, a group of combat veterans turned stand-up comedians.

Tom Fishburne is the founder of Marketoonist, a marketing agency focused on the unique medium of cartoons. Since 2010, they’ve developed marketing campaigns for businesses such as Google, IBM, LinkedIn, Dell, and Kronos. Sitting at the intersection of entertainment and hard-hitting marketing insight, Tom delivers branded content for some of the world’s biggest players and creates campaigns and animations that often go viral. In speeches, he uses cartoons and case studies to tell visual stories about marketing and innovation, blending humor and insight to deliver important takeaways and new ways of thinking about marketing and business to engaged audiences worldwide.

As a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in music perception and cognition, he is credited for fundamentally changing the way that scientists think about auditory memory, showing through the Levitin Effect, that long-term memory preserves many of the details of musical experience that previous theorists regarded as lost during the encoding process. He has consulted on audio sound source separation for the U.S. Navy, and worked for two years at Paul Allen’s Interval Research Corporation, a Silicon Valley computer firm where he worked on issues in Human-Computer Interaction, and Applications of Cognitive Psychology.