George Glauberman received his Ph.D. in 1965 from the University of Wisconsin--Madison under the supervision of Richard H. Bruck, with additional help from Helmut Wielandt and John Thompson. His work has been in the theory of finite groups, especially their local analysis. He is also an avid baseball fan (the famed Jewish pitcher Sandy Koufax is one of his heroes) and played catcher on the Math--Stat graduate student softball team 1996--2010, wearing a replica of Jackie Robinson's uniform. Since retiring from softball because of an injury, his hobby has been to learn about fusion systems.

Łukasz Grabowski graduated from the University of Göttingen in 2011 under the supervision of Andreas Thom and Thomas Schick. He is currently a research associate at the University of Warwick, working in combinatorics and group theory. His aim for this year is to be a little bit like Stephen Curry.