Itai Arad was born and raised in a Kibbutz in the south of Israel, where the howling old owl in the woods is hunting the horny back toad. He did his undergraduate studies in mathematics and physics at Tel Aviv University (B.Sc. 1996), and later his Ph.D. studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Itamar Procaccia in the subject of turbulence (Ph.D. 2001). After graduation he decided to study astrophysics, by taking a postdoc position at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, UK. He finally found his favourite research area with the help of Dorit Aharonov, who introduced him to the subject of Quantum Computation. After a postdoc in Berkeley with Umesh Vaziarani and some happy years at the Centre of Quantum Technologies (CQT) in Singapore, he is now an Assistant Professor at the faculty of Physics at the Technion in Israel. His research interests lie mainly in the intersection of condensed matter physics and quantum information, including Hamiltonian Complexity, and questions about area laws and tensor networks.

Miklos Santha received his Diploma in mathematics in 1979 from Eötvös University in Budapest, and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1983 from the Université Paris 7. His advisor was Jacques Stern. Since 1988 he has been a CNRS researcher, currently at the Université Paris Diderot, IRIF. He is also a principal investigator at CQT in Singapore.

Aarthi Sundaram hails from India, the land of diversity and contrasts. She received a B.E. in Computer Science and M.Sc. in Mathematics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science at their Goa campus in 2012. An elective course offered by Dr. Radhika Vatsan, during her undergraduate studies, introduced her to the world of Quantum Computing and provided the impetus to pursue research in this subject. She completed her Ph.D. at the Centre of Quantum Technologies (CQT) in 2017 in Singapore under the guidance of Miklos Santha. She is currently a Hartree Postdoctoral Fellow at the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Her research interests span classical and quantum complexity theory, including quantum algorithms, cryptography, Hamiltonian Complexity, and ideas pertaining to a quantum polynomial hierarchy. Outside of work she is an avid Formula 1 and racing enthusiast, and loves to peer through her camera lens to capture landscapes, architecture and moments.

Shengyu Zhang received his B.S. in Mathematics at Fudan University in 1999, his M.S. in Computer Science at Tsinghua University under the supervision of Mingsheng Ying in 2002, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton University under the supervision of Andrew Chi-Chih Yao in 2006. He then worked at NEC Laboratories America for a summer, and at the California Institute of Technology for two years as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2008, he joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong where he is now an associate professor. His main research interests are algorithms and complexity theories in various quantum and randomized models.