Victor Guillemin was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1937, obtained his Ph.Ddegree in Mathematics at Harvard in 1962, and has been a member of the MITMathematics Department since 1967. His area of expertise is symplecticgeometry, semi-classical analysis and linear partial differential equations.Johannes Sjöstrand was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1947, obtained his PhD degree in Mathematics at the University in Lund in 1972, he has spent most of his professional career in France (Paris, Nice, Orsay, Palaiseau and more recently at the Universite de Bourgogne in Dijon). He works in partial differential equations and spectral theory with tools from microlocal and occasionally complex analysis.