Scott Aaronson works on computational complexity, quantum computing, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. He holds a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley (supervised by Umesh Vazirani), an undergraduate degree from Cornell University, and a New York State GED. He was born in Philadelphia.

Andris Ambainis was born in Daugavpils, Latvia. After undergraduate studies at the University of Latvia, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001, supervised by Umesh Vazirani. Andris joined the University of Waterloo in August 2004. His research interests include quantum algorithms, quantum complexity theory, quantum cryptography as well as the classical theory of computation.