Aram W. Harrow graduated from M.I.T. in 2005 with a Ph.D. in physics; his advisor was Isaac Chuang. He has since worked at the University of Bristol for five years as a lecturer in computer science and math, and at the University of Washington as a research professor in computer science, before returning to MIT as an assistant professor of physics. His research focuses mainly on quantum computing, quantum information and connections between these fields and other areas of math, physics and computer science.

Alexandra Kolla received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani. She was a postdoc at The Institute for Advanced Study and Microsoft Research in Redmond. Since 2012, she has been on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She is a fellow at the Simons Institute in Berkeley for the academic year 2013-2014. Her research focuses mostly on spectral graph theory, approximation algorithms, complexity theory, convex programming, and quantum computing.

Leonard J. Schulman received the \bsc\ in Mathematics in 1988 and the Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 1992, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2000 he has been on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology. He has also held appointments at UC Berkeley, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. He has received the MIT Bucsela prize in mathematics, an NSF mathematical sciences postdoctoral fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, and the IEEE Schelkunoff prize. He is the director of the Caltech Center for the Mathematics of Information, is on the faculty of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the SIAM Journal on Computing. His research is in several overlapping areas: algorithms and communication protocols; combinatorics and probability; coding and information theory; quantum computation.