Johan Håstad received his Bachelor of Science from Stockholm University in 1981, his Master of Science from Uppsala University in 1984, and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1986 under the supervision of Shafi Goldwasser. Johan was appointed Associate Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden in 1988 and advanced to the level of Professor in 1992. He was elected a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 2001. He has research interests within several subareas of Theory of Algorithms and Complexity Theory but has recently mainly focused on the approximability of NP-hard optimization problems.

Sangxia Huang received a B.Eng. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2010, and a Ph.D. from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2015 under the supervision of Johan Håstad. He is currently a postdoc at EPFL in Ola Svensson's group. His research is mainly in the area of approximation algorithms and hardness of approximation.

Rajsekar Manokaran graduated from Princeton in 2012; his advisor was Sanjeev Arora. His thesis focused on the approximability of CSPs using mathematical relaxations. He was appointed as an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India in 2013.

Ryan O'Donnell received a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1999 and a Ph.D. from the MIT Mathematics Department in 2003. His Ph.D. advisor was Madhu Sudan. Following this he was a postdoc at IAS for a year in Avi Wigderson's group, and a postdoc at Microsoft Research for two years in Jennifer Chayes's group. Since 2006 he has been an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Ryan's research interests include Analysis of Boolean Functions, Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Quantum Complexity, and Probability. He enjoys his spare time.

John Wright received a B.Sc. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010 and a Ph.D. from the CMU Computer Science Department in 2016. His Ph.D. advisor was Ryan O'Donnell. He is currently a postdoc at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics in Eddie Farhi, Aram Harrow, and Peter Shor's group. His research areas include hardness of approximation and quantum computing.