Swastik Kopparty got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2010, and was advised by Madhu Sudan. During 2010-2011, he was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study and he has been at Rutgers University since then. Long before any of this, he got hooked on mathematics early in life because of his mathematician father (and eventual coauthor), K.P.S. Bhaskara Rao. Swastik's research interests are in complexity theory, error-correcting codes, finite fields, randomness and pseudorandomness.

Srikanth Srinivasan got his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where his interest in the theory side of CS was piqued under the tutelage of N.S. Narayanswamy. Subsequently, he obtained his Ph.D. from The Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 2011; his advisor was V. Arvind. His research interests span all of TCS (in theory), but in practice are limited to circuit complexity, derandomization, and related areas of mathematics. He enjoys running and pretending to play badminton.