Jakob Nordström received his Master of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from Stockholm University in 2001, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2008, where he was advised by Johan Håstad. During the academic years 2008-09 and 2009-10 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since 2011 he is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science and Communication at KTH. So far, he has worked mostly on proof complexity and on questions at the intersection of proof complexity and SAT solving.

In 1997-1998, Jakob served as a military interpreter at the Swedish Armed Forces Language Institute (Försvarets tolkskola). In parallel with his studies and later his research, he has worked as a Russian interpreter, engaged among others for His Majesty the King of Sweden and the Swedish Prime Minister. He also has a Diploma in Choir Conducting with extended Music Theory from the Tallinn Music Upper Secondary School, Estonia. During the period 1994-1999, he was the artistic director of Collegium Vocale Stockholm, a vocal ensemble performing mainly Renaissance and Baroque music.

Johan Håstad received his Bachelor of Science from Stockholm University in 1981, his Master of Science from Uppsala University in 1984 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1986 under the supervision of Shafi Goldwasser. Johan was appointed Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1988 and was promoted to Professor in 1992. He ha been a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences since 2001. He has research interests within several subareas of the Theory of Algorithms and Complexity theory but has, in recent years, mainly focused on the inapproximability of NP-hard optimization problems.