Professor, Cheriton Faculty Fellow, School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada

Lila Kari is Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. She received her M.Sc. in 1987 from the University of Bucharest, Romania, and her Ph.D. in 1991 for her thesis "On Insertions and Deletions in Formal Languages", for which she received the Rolf Nevanlinna doctoral thesis award for the best doctoral thesis in mathematics thesis in Finland. Author of more than 250 peer reviewed articles, Professor Kari is a recognized expert in the area of biomolecular computation, that is using biological, chemical and other natural systems to perform computations. In 2015 she received the Rozenberg Tulip Award for the DNA Computer Scientist of the Year, awarded at the 21st International conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming, Harvard University, USA , for her contributions in advancing formal theoretical models and exemplary leadership in the field. The award is presented by the International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation and Engineering, ISNSCE, annually and recognizes a prominent scientist who has shown continuous contributions, pioneering, original contributions, and who has influenced the development of the field.

Senior Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany

Tomasz Kociumaka received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Warsaw, Poland. He has been a post-doctoral researcher at Bar-Ilan University, Israel; the University of California at Berkeley, USA; and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany, where he is currently a senior researcher. His work focuses on designing efficient algorithms for processing strings, with an emphasis on sequence similarity measures, approximate pattern matching, text indexing, and lossless compression. He studies string problems from multiple perspectives, including combinatorics on words, dynamic algorithms, fine-grained complexity, sublinear algorithms, and quantum computing. He is a co-author of over 130 publications, including 38 papers presented at the top three conferences in theoretical computer science (STOC, FOCS, and SODA). In 2025, he received the EATCS Presburger Award for his contributions to string algorithms.

Professor, Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Canada

Meng He is a Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science in Dalhousie University. Previously, he held research, visiting and postdoctoral positions in Carleton University and the University of Waterloo. He obtained his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2008. Meng He’s research areas are algorithms, data structures, and computational geometry, on which he has authored over eighty peer-reviewed publications. He has co-chaired WADS 2021, CCCG 2021, and CCCG 2014, and has served on the steering committees of WADS and CCCG, and on the program committees of various conferences, including SoCG, ISAAC and CPM.