Andrej Bogdanov grew up in Macedonia in the former Yugoslavia. He tried to take his first steps in computing on a Galaksija but the machine wouldn't start. Later he attended summer camps for kids who like geometry, the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality (still a favorite), and swimming in lake Ohrid at sunset. Andrej went on to MIT, Berkeley, The Institute for Advanced Study, DIMACS at Rutgers, and ITCS at Tsinghua University, before joining, in 2008, the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and associate director of the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science and Communications. His research interests include pseudorandomness, cryptography, and sublinear-time algorithms.

Zeev Dvir is an assistant professor at Princeton University jointly appointed by the Computer science and Mathematics departments. Prior to that he was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute in Israel in 2008. His advisors were Ran Raz and Amir Shpilka.

Elad Verbin did his Ph.D. with Haim Kaplan (2003) at Tel Aviv University. He is currently a postdoc in the Computer Science Department of Aarhus University, jointly appointed by MADALGO and the computational complexity group.

Amir Yehudayoff did his Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Ran Raz. He then spent two years as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, hosted by Avi Wigderson. He is currently a member of the Mathematics department at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology. Amir enjoys moving, dancing, and improvisation in movement.