Shayan Oveis Gharan (listed alphabetically under “O”) is an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the MS&E department at Stanford University under the supervision of Amin Saberi and Luca Trevisan. Before joining UW he spent a year and a half as a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley where his host was Umesh Vazirani. He did his undergraduate studies at the Computer Engineering department at Sharif University. Shayan's research areas include the design and analysis of algorithms, spectral graph theory, and applied probability. Shayan received an ACM doctoral dissertation award honorable mention for his Ph.D. thesis “New Rounding Techniques for the Design and Analysis of Approximation Algorithms” in 2014. He and his coauthors received Best Paper awards at SODA 2010 and FOCS 2011 for their work on the Traveling Salesman Problem.

Luca Trevisan is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at U.C. Berkeley and a senior scientist at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Luca received his Dottorato (Ph.D.) in 1997, from the Sapienza University of Rome, working with Pierluigi Crescenzi. After graduating, Luca was a post-doc at MIT and at DIMACS, and he was on the faculty of Columbia University, U.C. Berkeley, and Stanford, before returning to Berkeley in 2014. Luca's research is in theoretical computer science, and in the past six years he has been interested in spectral graph theory and its applications to graph algorithms. Luca lives, beyond his means, in San Francisco. When out of town, he can often be found in Rome or in Hong Kong.