Zongchen Chen is an instructor (postdoc) in Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2021, advised by Eric Vigoda. Before that, he received his B. S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from the Zhiyuan College at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2016. He has broad interests in randomized algorithms, discrete probability, and combinatorics. Currently, his research focuses on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for sampling from Gibbs distributions, and machine learning problems related to undirected graphical models.

Santosh Vempala is the Frederick Storey professor in the College of Computing and former director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center at Georgia Tech. His research interests, ironically, are in algorithms, randomness, and geometry. He graduated from CMU in 1997 following the advice of Avrim Blum and was at MIT till 2006 except for a year as a Miller fellow at UC Berkeley. He gets unreasonably excited when a phenomenon that appears complex from one perspective turns out to be simple from another. At Georgia Tech, he started the Computing-for-Good (C4G) program.