Panagiota Fatourou is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Crete, Greece and the Institute of Computer Science (ICS) of the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH). She has been (twice) a visiting Professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Prior to joining the University of Crete and FORTH ICS, she was a full-time faculty member at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering of the University of Ioannina. She has worked as a postdoc at Max-Planck Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany, and at the Computer Science Department of the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests focus on the principles of parallel and distributed computing.

Panagiota Fatourou is the chair of the ACM Europe Council (and since July 2015, an elected member of the council, currently serving her second term). She has served as the editor of the Distributed Computing Column of the Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (BEATCS), and as the General Chair of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2013), the top conference in her field. She is a member-at-large of the steering committees of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS). She has served as the PC Chair of the 20th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2016) (together with Fernando Pedone, University of Lugano, Switzerland), and of the 19th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS’17), track “Distributed Computing and Communication Networks” (together with Sergio Rajsbaum, UNAM, Mexico). She has participated in the PC of more than 40 conferences. She has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker and a Featured ACM Member. She has been awarded an FSMP Distinguished Professor Fellowship from the Foundation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris.

Panagiota Fatourou was the coordinator of TransForm - Theoretical Foundations of Transactional Memory, an EU-funded Marie Curie Initial Training Network (2008 - 2013), and the co-coordinator (together with Manolis Katevenis) of the GreenVM project (ARISTEIA Action of the Operational Programme "Education and Lifelong Learning"). She was the Greek representative of the COST Action Euro-TM: Transactional Memories: Foundations, Algorithms, Tools, and Applications, and is the Greek representative and a member of the Management Committee of the COST Action EUGAIN: European Network For Gender Balance in Informatics. She has participated in many additional research and development projects.

Themis Palpanas is Senior Member of the French University Institute (IUF), a distinction that recognizes excellence across all academic disciplines, and professor of computer science at the University of Paris (France), where he is director of the Data Intelligence Institute of Paris (diiP), and director of the data management group, diNo. He received the BS degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and the MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Toronto, Canada. He has previously held positions at the University of California at Riverside, University of Trento, and at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and visited Microsoft Research, and the IBM Almaden Research Center. His interests include problems related to data science (big data analytics and machine learning applications). He is the author of nine US patents, three of which have been implemented in world-leading commercial data management products, and 2 French patents. He is the recipient of three Best Paper awards, and the IBM Shared University Research (SUR) Award. He is currently serving on the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees, as an Editor in Chief for the BDR Journal, Associate Editor for VLDB 2022 and the IDA journal, as well as on the Editorial Advisory Board of the IS journal, and the Editorial Board of the TLDKS Journal. He has served as General Chair for VLDB 2013, Associate Editor for TKDE, VLDB 2019 and 2017, Research PC Vice Chair for ICDE 2020, and Workshop Chair for EDBT 2016, ADBIS 2013, and ADBIS 2014, General Chair for the PDA@IOT International Workshop (in conjunction with VLDB 2014), and General Chair for the Event Processing Symposium 2009.