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Philippe Toint is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Namur, Belgium, specializing in numerical analysis, OR, and continuous optimization. His academic career has centered on the theory, computation, and software design of large-scale nonlinear optimization, including the co-development of the LANCELOT software package and contributions to trust-region and filter methods. Philippe has co-authored several books and about 200 papers, the vast majority of which were published in highly regarded journals. He was elected a SIAM Fellow in 2009, received the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize in 1994, and the Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization in 2006. He also served as Chair of the Mathematical Optimization Society from 2010 to 2012.

Robert Vanderbei is a Professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. From 2005 to 2012, he was chair of the department. In addition, he holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Mathematics, Astrophysics, Computer Science, and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He is also a member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, is a founding member of the Bendheim Center for Finance, and a former Director of the Engineering and Management Systems Program. Beyond Princeton, he is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Society for Applied and Industrial Mathematics (SIAM) and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Within INFORMS, he has served as President of the Optimization Society and the Computing Society and is the 2017 winner of the Khachiyan Prize for his work in optimization. He also serves on the Advisory Board for the journal Mathematical Programming Computation. He has degrees in Chemistry (BS), Operations Research and Statistics (MS), and Applied Mathematics (MS, PhD). After receiving his PhD from Cornell (1981), he was an NSF postdoc at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences (NYU) for one year, then a lecturer in the Mathematics Department at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign for two years before joining Bell Labs in 1984. At Bell Labs he made fundamental contributions to the field of optimization and holds three patents for his inventions. In 1990, he left Bell Labs to join Princeton University where he has been since. In addition to hundreds of research papers, he has written four books: (i) a textbook entitled Linear Programming: Foundations and Extensions now in its fifth edition and published by Springer, (ii) Welcome To The Universe in 3D, an astronomy book written jointly with Neil deGrasse Tyson, J. Richard Gott and Michael Strauss and published by Princeton University Press, (iii) Sizing Up The Universe, an introductory astronomy book written jointly with J. Richard Gott and published by National Geographic, and (iv) Real and Convex Analysis, a textbook written jointly with Erhan Cinlar and published by Springer.

Katya Scheinberg is a Coca-Cola Foundation Chair and Professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she held positions at Cornell and Lehigh Universities and at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She attended Moscow University for her undergraduate studies and received her PhD degree from Columbia University. Katya’s main research areas are related to developing practical algorithms (and their theoretical analysis) for various problems in continuous optimization, such as convex optimization, derivative-free optimization, machine learning, quadratic programming, etc. She is an INFORMS Fellow, a SIAM Fellow, and a recipient of the Lagrange Prize from SIAM and MOS, the Farkas Prize from the INFORMS Optimization Society, and the Outstanding Simulation Publication Award from the INFORMS Simulation Society. Katya currently serves as the Chair of the Mathematical Optimization Society and a co-editor of the Mathematical Programming journal. Her past service includes editor-in-chief of Mathematics of Operations Research and Chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization.

Aharon “Ronny” Ben-Tal is a Professor of OR and former head of the MINERVA Optimization Center at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion). His interests lie in Continuous Optimization, particularly nonsmooth and large-scale problems, conic and robust optimization, as well as convex and nonsmooth analysis. He has published more than 130 papers in professional journals and co-authored three books. Ronny was Dean of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion and he also served as a council member of the Mathematical Programming Society. He was Area Editor Operations Research and Math. of OR, and member of the Editorial Board of SIAM J. Optimization, J. Convex Analysis, OR Letters, Mathematical Programming, Management Science, Math. Modeling and Numerical Analysis, EJOR, and Computational Management Science. He also served as Associate Editor for SIAM J. Optimization. He in an EURO Gold Medalist, an INFORMS and SIAM fellow, and a Distinguished Scientist by CWI in The Netherlands. Ronny is a recipient of the IBM Faculty Award, and was also awarded the Khachiyan Prize by the INFORMS Optimization Society for lifetime achievements in the area of Optimization. In addition, the OR Society of Israel awarded him the lifetime achievement Prize. As of April 2026, he has over 41,000 citations on Google Scholar.

Jorge Nocedal is a Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. He obtained his B.S. degree from UNAM, Mexico, and a PhD from Rice University. His research is in optimization, both deterministic and stochastic, and with emphasis on large-scale problems. He served as editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Optimization, is a SIAM Fellow, and was awarded the 2012 George B. Dantzig Prize (MOS-SIAM), the 2017 Von Neumann Theory Prize (INFORMS), and the 2024 John Von Neumann Prize (SIAM) for contributions to theory and algorithms of nonlinear optimization. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.