John R. Birge is Hobart W. Williams Distinguished Service Professor of Operations Management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Princeton University in 1977 and a master's degree and a PhD in operations research from Stanford University in 1979 and 1980, respectively. He is the recipient of the Best Paper Award from the Japan Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Fellows Award, the Institute of Industrial Engineers Medallion Award and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He studies mathematical modeling of systems under uncertainty, especially for maximizing operational and financial goals using the methodologies of stochastic programming and large-scale optimization.

Fernando Paganini received degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from Universidad de la República, Uruguay (1990), and his MS (1992) and PhD (1996) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. From 1996 to 1997 he was postdoctoral associate at MIT. Between 1997 and 2005 he was on the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department at UCLA, reaching the rank of Associate Professor. Since 2005 he is Professor of Engineering at Universidad ORT Uruguay, and currently Associate Dean of Research.

Dr. Paganini has received the 1995 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, the 1999 Packard Fellowship, the 2004 George S. Axelby Best Paper Award, and the 2010 Elsevier Scopus Prize. He is a member of the Uruguayan National Academies, both in Science and in Engineering, and a member of the Latin American Academy of Sciences. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has served in Editorial boards of IEEE journals in his fields of interest: control and networks. In 2020-21 he served as one of the three coordinators of the Honorary Scientific Advisory Group advising the Uruguayan President on the COVID-19 pandemic.