Chandra Chekuri received his B. Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (now Chennai) in 1993 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1998 under the supervision of the late Rajeev Motwani. After finishing his Ph.D. he worked eight formative years at Lucent Bell Labs before moving to the University of Illinois. He is interested in many topics but mainly works in algorithm design, combinatorial optimization, graphs, and mathematical programming. He has very much enjoyed teaching since he was in middle school. His childhold was spent mostly in the town of Rajahmundry on the banks of the beautiful river Godavari where his parents still live and his children like to visit.

Shi Li received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University, under the supervision of Moses Charikar. From 2013 to 2015, he was a research assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. His research interest is algorithm design.