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.

Francesca Parise is an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. She defended her PhD at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2016 and she received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Information and Automation Engineering in 2010 and 2012, from the University of Padova, Italy, where she simultaneously attended the Galilean School of Excellence.

Francesca was recognized as an EECS rising star in 2017 and is the recipient of the Guglielmo Marin Award from the “Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti”, the SNSF Early Postdoc Fellowship, the SNSF Advanced Postdoc Fellowship and the ETH Medal for her doctoral work.

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.

Mathukumalli Vidyasagar is SERB National Science Chair and Distinguished Scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India. He received his Ph.D. from Wisconsin and has held positions in academia, industry, and government. He has published 13 books and more than 150 journal articles. His most recent research interests are in compressed sensing, reinforcement learning, and modelling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alexander Medvedev is Professor of Control Engineering, Director of Program in Automatic Control, and Professor in Charge for PhD program in Automatic Control at Uppsala University. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. with honors in control theory from the Leningrad Electrical Engineering Institute in 1987 and 1981, respectively. He is the Chair of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Healthcare and Medical Systems. His research interests include parameter and state estimation in nonlinear and hybrid dynamic systems in the context of endocrine systems, human smooth pursuit, model-based drug delivery, and deep brain stimulation.