Nikhil Bansal received his Ph.D. from CMU in 2003; advised by Avrim Blum where he benefited greatly from his wisdom and caring. His research has focused on approximation and online algorithms for scheduling and other optimization problems. He grew up all over India, living in more than a dozen cities. After living in the U.S. for several years, he recently moved to the Netherlands, where he is still getting used to the idea that he can bike to anywhere without being run over by speeding maniacs.

Nitish Korula received his Ph.D. in 2012 at the University of Illinois, where he was advised by Chandra Chekuri, and his B.E. in 2004 from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, where he benefited from the guidance of Sundar Balasubramaniam. After graduating, he joined Google as a Research Scientist in New York, a striking change from Champaign-Urbana, Pilani, and Vellore, where he grew up. His research interests are in approximation algorithms, particularly for network design and other graph problems, online algorithms, and combinatorics.

Viswanath Nagarajan received his M.S. (2006) and Ph.D. (2009) degrees from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of R. Ravi. He thanks R. Ravi and Anupam Gupta for their guidance in his early research career. After graduating from CMU, he became a Research Staff Member in the algorithms group at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. His research interests are in approximation algorithms and combinatorial optimization. He grew up in Chennai, Kochi, and Mumbai, where he also received his Bachelors degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Aravind Srinivasan received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1993 under the guidance of David B. Shmoys. In addition to David Shmoys, he thanks Joel Spencer for mentoring him during his early career. He is a Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests include algorithms, probabilistic methods, networks, and computational approaches to sustainability. He grew up in the city of Chennai (formerly Madras) in India, and his native language is Tamil. He is motivated by humor, and is inspired by Nature.