Venkatesan Guruswami, or Venkat, as his colleagues call him, received his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras in 1997. Venkat received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. He was fortunate to be advised by Madhu Sudan, with whom he enjoyed collaboration on a number of topics, most notably on list decoding.

Since 2008, Venkat has been on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Earlier, he was a faculty member at the University of Washington. Venkat was a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley during 2001-02, a member of the School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study during 2007-08, and a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England during January-June 2014.

Venkat is interested in several topics in theoretical computer science, including algorithmic and algebraic coding theory, approximability of fundamental optimization problems, pseudorandomness, PCPs, and computational complexity theory.

Venkat currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the ACM, the SIAM Journal on Computing, and the journal Research in the Mathematical Sciences, and was previously on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and is the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computation Theory. He was recently Program Committee chair for the 2015 Foundations of Computer Science conference and the 2012 Computational Complexity Conference. Venkat is a recipient of the Presburger award, Packard Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER award, ACM's Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award.

In his (sadly limited) spare time, Venkat enjoys traveling, ethnic vegetarian food, racquet sports, and listening to Carnatic music.

Euiwoong Lee is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Venkat Guruswami. He is interested in various aspects of approximation algorithms, including hardness of approximation and the power of LP / SDP hierarchies. After graduating from high school in Seoul, South Korea, he moved to the U.S. and received a B.S. and an M.S. degrees from Caltech. He enjoys playing and watching basketball.