Alicia is a Full Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and a Senior Researcher at CONICET. She was the Vice-President of the International Mathematical Union during the period 2015-2018.  She is a Member of the National Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences (ANCEFN),  a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a SIAM fellow and Simons Senior Research Associate of the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Italy.  She has received the 2015 TWAS international prize in Mathematics, the ANCEFN Consecration Prize in 2017 and the l’Óreal-Unesco for Women in Science international award in 2021.  She has been a visiting professor in institutions in different countries, for example in Sweden at the KTH with funds from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and in France at the Univ. Paris Diderot with an Alicia Moreau chair, and in the US at the MSRI as Eisenbud Professor and as Simons Professor. 

Alicia is an expert in Algebraic Geometry who has been interested in applications in mathematical biology. She has made significant contributions to the study of toric varieties, hypergeometric functions, tropical geometry and polynomial systems arising from combinatorics and algebraic geometry. Her research on these topics has led to important advances in some other areas such as chemical reaction networks.

Elisenda is a Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences of the University of Copenhagen, in the research group Mathematics of Reaction Networks. She is a board member of the European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology and a member of the Mathematics panel of the Spanish Research Agency. She is also a member of the Scientific Committee of the Spanish Royal Society of Mathematics (RSME). She is the PI of a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant (2022-2027) for the project “Signs, polynomials, and reaction networks” and was granted a Sapere Aude Starting Grant from the Independent Research Fund of Denmark (2015-2020).

Elisenda holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Universitat de Barcelona, in the area of Arakelov Geometry/Algebraic K-theory for which she received the Josep Teixidor prize from the Catalan Studies Institute. Later on, she obtained a MSc in Bioinformatics for Health Sciences from the Universitat de Barcelona and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Since then, her research focuses on the application and development of tools in algebraic geometry and algebra to address questions arising in molecular biology. Specifically, she focuses on the mathematical study of interaction networks, mainly on understanding their properties at around equilibrium.

Ezra is a Full Professor in Mathematics at Duke University but also a Full Professor in Statistical Sciences since 2015 at Duke.  He has been the Associate Director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematics Sciences Institute (SAMSI 2011-2014). Before that, he was a Professor at the University of Minnesota and member of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. He has also been a Simons CRM Professor at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques at Montréal.  He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, inaugural class, and has been the PI of numerous NSF research grants.

Ezra obtained his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Bernd Sturmfels. Their book “Combinatorial Commutative Algebra” is now a classic in the area. He also co-authored the book “Twenty-four hours of Local Cohomology and has papers published in top journals such as Annals Math., Duke Math. J, Inventiones Math. or J. Amer. Math. Soc. His research centers around problems in geometry, algebra, topology, combinatorics, statistics, probability, and computation originating in mathematics and the sciences, including biology, chemistry, computer science, and imaging.