Johan Håstad received his Bachelor of Science from Stockholm University in 1981, his Master of Science from Uppsala University in 1984, and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1986 under the supervision of Shafi Goldwasser. Johan was appointed Associate Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden in 1988 and advanced to the level of Professor in 1992. He was elected a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 2001. He has research interests within several subareas of Theory of Algorithms and Complexity theory but has recently mainly focused on the inapproximability of NP-hard optimization problems.

Rajsekar Manokaran graduated from Princeton in 2012; his advisor was Sanjeev Arora. The subject of his thesis was the inapproximability of constraint satisfaction problems using convex relaxations. He was appointed as an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2013.