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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.

Alain Hertz graduated in mathematical engineering and obtained a Ph.D in operations research at the École Polytechnqiue Fédérale de Lausanne. Since 2001, he is professor at the department of mathematics and industrial engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, Canada. He is also member of the multi disciplinary GERAD research group that includes nearly sixty researchers and experts in operations research and discrete mathematics. He is the author of around 200 scientific publications and 4 detective novels. His main research domains are combinatorial optimization, graph theory, algorithmics, and the development of decision aid systems for scheduling and distribution problems. Alain serves on the editorial board of several scientific journals and he is also a member of the executive committee of the European Chapter on Combinatorial Optimization working group. He has organized several international conferences on graphs and optimization. He was president of the Swiss OR Society from 1996 to 2001, during which he dedicated himself to promoting the discipline worldwide.

Professor Terlaky is the director of the Quantum Computing and Optimization Laboratory (QCOL). He served as the Chair of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Lehigh University, 2008 – 2017. Prior to his appointment at Lehigh U., Prof. Terlaky has taught at Eötvös U., Budapest, Hungary; Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands; McMaster U., ON, Canada. At McMaster he also served as the founding Director of the School of Computational Engineering and Science. Prof. Terlaky has published four books, edited over ten books and journal special issues and published over 220 research papers. Topics include theoretical and algorithmic foundations of operations research (e.g., invention of the criss-cross method), design and analysis of large classes of interior point methods, computational optimization, worst case examples of the central path, nuclear reactor core reloading optimization, oil refinery and VLSI design optimization and robust radiation therapy treatment optimization. Further, his research interest includes high performance optimization methods, optimization modeling, optimization problems in engineering sciences, and Quantum Computing Optimization. Prof. Terlaky is Founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Optimization and Engineering, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications . He has served as associate editor of ten journals and has served as conference chair, conference organizer, and distinguished invited speaker at conferences all over the world. He was general Chair of the INFORMS 2015 Annual Meeting, a former Chair of INFORMS’ Optimization Society, Chair of the ICCOPT Steering Committee of the Mathematical Optimization Society, Chair of the SIAM Activity Groupon Optimization. He received: the MITACS Mentorship Award for his distinguished Ph.D. student supervisory record; the Egerváry Award of the Hungarian Operations Research Society; the Award of Merit of the Canadian Operations Research Society; The Wagner Prize of INFORMS; The Outstanding Innovation in Service Science Engineering Award of IISE. Prof. Terlaky is Fellow of the Fields Institute, Fellow of INFORMS, Fellow of SIAM, Fellow of IFORS, and Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.