Mrinal Kumar is a faculty member in the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. Before moving to TIFR in 2022, he spent a few years as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. He is generally interested in questions in Computational Complexity, Algebraic Complexity and Coding Theory. He did his Ph.D. at Rutgers, where he was advised by Swastik Kopparty and Shubhangi Saraf, and spent his postdoctoral years at a convex combination of Harvard, the Simons Institute and the University of Toronto before moving to Mumbai in 2019. Much before that, he grew up in the then small town of Deoghar in the state of Jharkhand in India, and for the first fifteen years of his life dreamed of growing up to play cricket for a living. His interest in math was kindled during the course of his interaction with Dr. Jugal Kishore Singh, his math teacher in high school. Dr. Singh convinced him (and half his teammates in the cricket team!) that math could be interesting, challenging and yet accessible. His unconventional lectures were full of delightful anecdotes, fantastic questions and quite remarkably, even his exams were enjoyable, non-scary and yet interesting. Perhaps most importantly, he encouraged his students to think independently, which many of his former students believe is the most important thing that they ever learnt in school.

Ramprasad Saptharishi is a faculty member in the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and is generally interested in most questions of an algebraic nature. He did his Ph.D. at Chennai Mathematical Institute, advised by Prof. Manindra Agrawal, and spent a couple of years at Microsoft Research, India and Tel Aviv University for his postdoc. His other interests include board games, reading ridiculously long web-series and writing software code. However, writing reasonable biographies continues to remain outside his area of expertise.

Anamay Tengse is currently a postdoc at Reichman University in Herzliya, and was a postdoc at the University of Haifa for a couple of years before that. This work was done when he was a Ph.D. student in the School of Technology and Computer Science at TIFR, Mumbai, advised by Ramprasad Saptharishi. Prior to that, he obtained an M.Tech. from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay, where he first got interested in the theoretical aspects of computing. His interest in research comes largely from his interactions with the faculty and his friends from Goa College of Engineering, where he did his undergrad. He spends a dangerously large chunk of his time indulging in music, cricket, quizzes on sporcle, trying to understand poetry and linguistics, and justifying his lack of interest in football (soccer) to people who question his Goan origin.