Alissa S. Crans earned her B.S. in mathematics from the University of Redlands in 1999 and her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Riverside in 2004, under the guidance of John Baez. She is currently an Assistant Professor of mathematics at Loyola Marymount University and has held positions at Pomona College, The Ohio State University, and the University of Chicago.

Alissa’s research is in the field of higher-dimensional algebra and her current work, funded by an NSA Young Investigator Grant, involves categorifying algebraic structures called quandles with the goal of defining new knot and knotted surface invariants. She is also interested in the connections between mathematics and music, and enjoys playing the clarinet with the Santa Monica College wind ensemble.

Alissa is extremely active in helping students increase their appreciation and enthusiasm for mathematics through co-organizing the Pacific Coast Undergraduate Mathematics Conference together with Naiomi Cameron and Kendra Killpatrick, and her mentoring of young women in the Summer Mathematics Program (SMP) at Carleton College, the EDGE program, and the Career Mentoring Workshop.

Ken Ono received his PhD from UCLA in 1993, under the guidance of Basil Gordon. Upon graduation, he held positions at the University of Georgia, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Institute of Advanced Studies, and Penn State University, where he was named the Louis P. Martarano Professor in 1999. He is presently the Manasse Professor of Letters and Science, and the Hilldale Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

He has authored over 100 research papers, as well as the CBMS monograph entitled The Web of Modularity. His work includes ground-breaking results on partition congruences, modular forms, Borcherds products and mock theta functions. He has advised 17 PhD students to date, and he sits on the editorial boards of 11 journals. He has received awards including a Sloan Fellowship, a Presidential Early Career Award (awarded by President Clinton), a Packard Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In addition to his research accomplishments, Ono is a well known lecturer and teacher, as evidenced by his receipt of the 2005 National Science Foundation Director's Distinguished Teaching Scholar Award, and the 2007 and 2009 Favorite Instructor Award from the University of Wisconsin Residence Halls.

Zvezdelina Stankova (Zvezda) is a Frederick A. Rice Associate Professor of Mathematics at Mills College, where she has served as the Department Head for two years. She is the founder and the Director of the Berkeley Math Circle at UC Berkeley.
Zvezda was drawn into the world of mathematics when, as a 5th grader, she joined the math circle at her school in Bulgaria and won, three months later, the Regional Math Olympiad. She represented her home country at two International Mathematical Olympiads (IMOs), earning silver medals. As a freshwoman at Sofia University, Zvezda won a competition to study in the U.S. and, encouraged by her advisors Professors Rhonda Hughes and Paul Melvin, completed a dual BA/MA degree at Bryn Mawr College in 1992. She did her first math research in the area of enumerative combinatorics at two summer REU's in Duluth, Minnesota, under the mentorship of Professor Joseph Gallian. The resulting papers contributed to her Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman, awarded by the Association for Women in Mathematics. In 1997, Zvezda received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in the field of algebraic geometry under the supervision of Professor Joseph Harris, with a thesis on moduli spaces of trigonal curves. Meanwhile, she did something outside of the beaten path for math Ph.D.'s: she concurrently completed a year program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, earning a high school teaching certificate in the state of Massachusetts, and later in California through UC Berkeley.

As a postdoctoral fellow at MSRI and UC Berkeley in 1997-1999, Zvezda came full circle by founding the Berkeley Math Circle (BMC) and co-founding the Bay Area Mathematical Olympiad. Since then, she has delivered more than 200 math circles sessions and conference presentations at over 45 locations. Starting with a handful of math circles in 1998, Zvezda's pioneering work in collaboration with MSRI, AIM and a number of SF Bay Area mathematicians, helped inspire and establish dozens of new circles throughout the U.S. and abroad (the current count is around 75). In addition, she trained the USA national team for the IMOs for six years, including the memorable year 2001 when three of the six U.S.A. team members were from BMC. In 2009, she co-edited "A Decade of the Berkeley Math Circle - the American Experience'', volume I, published by AMS in the MSRI book series Mathematical Circles Library. Her article there on Inversion in the Plane was inspired by one of the very first lectures she heard as a teenager at the training of the Bulgarian IMO team. A second volume is forthcoming.

Since 1999, she has worked at Mills College. Her current research interests include classification of restricted patterns, specifically, Wilf-equivalences and shape-Wilf-ordering, in the area of enumerative and algebraic combinatorics. Zvezda's inspiring style and passion to teach and communicate mathematics beyond the classroom have been recognized by the MAA: in 2004 she was selected as a co-recipient of the first Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning College or University Mathematics Faculty Member.