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Thomas Stützle is a research director of the Belgian F.R.S.-FNRS (National Science Foundation) working at the IRIDIA laboratory of Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. He received the Diplom (German equivalent of MSc. degree) in business engineering from the Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany in 1994, and his PhD and habilitation in computer science both from the Computer Science Department of Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, in 1998 and 2004, respectively. He has co-authored three books among which are “Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications” (Morgan Kaufmann) and “Ant Colony Optimization” (MIT Press), both being the main references in their respective areas. His other publications include more than 250 articles in journals, international conferences or edited books many of which are highly cited. In fact, his research contributions received so far more than 60,000 citations in Google Scholar and his h-index is 84. His main research interests are in stochastic local search algorithm, swarm intelligence, multi-objective optimization, and automatic design of algorithms. He is probably best known (i) for his contributions to early advancements in ant colony optimization including algorithms such as Max-Min Ant System, (ii) the establishment of algorithmic frameworks for iterated local search and iterated greedy, and (iii) as a driving force in the advancement of automatic algorithm configuration techniques and their usage in the automatic design of high-performing algorithms. He received seven best paper awards from conferences and his 2002 GECCO paper on “A Racing Algorithm for Configuring Metaheuristics” received the 2012 SIGEVO impact award. He is an Associate Editor of Applied Mathematics and Computation, Computational Intelligence, Evolutionary Computation, International Transactions in Operational Research, and Swarm Intelligence and on the editorial board of seven other journals. He is also frequently involved in international conferences and workshops with program or organizational responsibilities. In 2018, Thomas suffered a stroke that affected, among other things, his ability to remember words, but he has improved a lot and he is now working full time again.

Ignacio E. Grossmann is the R. R. Dean University Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and former department head at Carnegie Mellon University. He obtained his B.S. degree at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, in 1974, and his M.S. and Ph.D. at Imperial College in 1975 and 1977, respectively. He is a member and former director of the Center for Advanced Process Decision-making, an industrial consortium that involves about 20 petroleum, chemical, engineering, and software companies. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and Fellow of AIChE and INFORMS. He has received the INFORMS Computing Society Prize and the following AIChE awards: Computing in Chemical Engineering, William H. Walker for

Dr. Robert Bixby has a BS in IEOR from U.C. Berkeley (1968), and a PhD in OR from Cornell (1972). He has held academic positions at the University of Kentucky, Northwestern University, and Rice University. He is currently Noah Harding Professor Emeritus at Rice University and visiting Professor of Mathematics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He co-founded CPLEX Optimization in 1987, and co-founded Gurobi Optimization in 2008, serving as CEO from 2008-2015. Dr. Bixby has published over fifty journal articles and is an acknowledged expert on the computational aspects of linear and integer programming. He has won the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize of the Mathematical Programming Society, and the INFORMS Impact and Frederick W. Lanchester Prizes. He was Editor-in-Chief Mathematical Programming, Series A, 1989-1994, and Chairman of the Mathematical Programming Society, 2001-2004. In 1997 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and in 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Changhyun Kwon is an Associate Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at KAIST. His research aims to advance computational optimization methods for efficient transportation and logistics systems. His current focus is to improve the efficiency of heuristic and exact algorithms using machine-learning approaches to solve large-scale vehicle routing problems and mobility service operations problems. He received a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering in 2008 from Penn State and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from KAIST in 2000. His research has been published in Operations Research, Transportation Science, Transportation Research Part B, INFORMS Journal on Computing, etc. Before joining KAIST, he was a faculty member at the University at Buffalo and the University of South Florida. Currently, he is on the Editorial Boards of Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, and the Transportation Network Modeling Committee of TRB. He was the Chair of the Urban Transportation SIG of the INFORMS TSL Society and is the current International Liaison for Asia/Oceania. He wrote the book "Julia Programming for Operations Research," and he is a member of the JuMP steering committee, an open-source community for developing mathematical optimization tools in Julia. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2014, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Jing-Sheng Jeannette Song is the R. David Thomas Professor of Business Administration and a Professor of Operations Management at the Fuqua School of Business of Duke University. Professor Song holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She studies supply chain management and operations strategy, topics including supply chain inventory optimization and resilience strategies, Assemble-to Order systems and supply chain flexibility, dynamic pricing and inventory control, data-driven operational decision-making, supply chain digitization, e-commerce strategies and network design, and socially responsible operations. She has published numerous articles in leading academic journals, such as Management Science, Operations Research, and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. She has edited and co-edited two books, “Research Handbook on Inventory Management” and “Supply Chain Structures: Coordination, Information and Optimization.” She has also co-authored the book “The Art of Matching: Joy of Living and Operations Innovations” (in Chinese). Professor Song is an INFORMS Fellow, a Distinguished Fellow and former President of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) Society, and a Department Editor for Management Science and Service Science. She is also a former Area Editor for Operations Research and IIE Transactions. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Overseas Young Scholar Award（海外 出青年）by the Natural Science Foundation of China and was named a Chang Jiang Chaired Professor by the Ministry of Education in China (教育部长江学者讲座教授).

Karla Hoffman is a Professor in the Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department at George Mason University (GMU) where she served as Chair for five years. She received her D.Sc. from George Washington University in operations research. Prior to her position at GMU, she worked as a mathematician in the Center for Applied Mathematics of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where, in 1984, she was awarded the Applied Research Award. Her other awards include George Mason University's Distinguished Faculty Award, the INFORMS Fellows Award, the INFORMS George E. Kimball Medal and the INFORMS Edelman Prize. Recently, she was inducted as a Fellow of IFORS (The International Federation of OR Societies). She served as President of INFORMS in 1999 and has also served on the Executive Committees of ORSA, IFORS, and the Mathematical Programming Society. She has served on multiple editorial boards. Dr. Hoffman’s primary areas of research are optimization and auction design and testing. Her research focuses on the development of new algorithms for solving complex problems arising in industry and government. She serves as a consultant to the FCC on spectrum auctions and has previously consulted to a variety of government agencies including Dept. of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Dept. of Transportation, and the Commerce Department. Her industrial consulting has been in dynamic and real-time routing and scheduling, and in capital budgeting.

Paolo Toth is "Professor Emeritus" of “Operations Research” at DEI: (Department of Electrical and Information Engineering “Guglielmo Marconi”, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna,

Jayme Szwarcfiter is a Professor Emeritus at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Visiting Professor at Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) in Brazil. His research interests are related to Graph Theory, Algorithms, Theory of Computation, and Discrete Mathematics. He has published more than 170 journal papers and several influential textbooks in these areas, and has supervised dozens of masters and doctoral students. Jayme is a Full Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and he has received numerous national and international awards such as the Grand Cross for Scientific Merit, the Almirante Álvaro Alberto prize, the Scientific Merit Prize awarded by the Brazilian Computer Society, and the Luis Federico Leloir prize, awarded by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation of Argentina. In addition, Jayme was a visiting professor in many countries like the US, England, Scotland, Argentina, Germany, France, Poland, Israel, Czech Republic, and Japan.

Margarida Carvalho has a bachelor and masters in mathematics. In 2016, she completed the PhD in computer science at the University of Porto (Portugal) for which she received the 2018 EURO Doctoral Dissertation Award. In 2017, she came to Montreal as an IVADO postdoctoral fellow at Polytechnique and never left since then. One year after, 2018, she became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montreal, where now she holds the FRQ-IVADO Research Chair in Data Science for Combinatorial Game Theory.

Bruce Golden received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and his masters and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of the University of Maryland Business School in 1976 and served as a Department Chairman from 1980 to 1996. Currently, he is the France-Merrick Chair in Management Science in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His research interests include heuristic search, combinatorial optimization, networks, and applied operations research. Bruce has received numerous awards, including the Thomas L. Saaty Prize (1994 and 2005), the University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award (2000), the INFORMS Award for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice (2003), and the INFORMS Computing Society Prize (2005). He was named an INFORMS Fellow in 2004. Since 1999, Bruce has served as Editor-in-Chief of NETWORKS. Before that, he was Editor-in-Chief of the INFORMS Journal on Computing.