John Berlinsky received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972. He was a post-doc at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the University of Amsterdam before joining the faculty of UBC in 1977. In 1986 he moved to McMaster University where he is now Emeritus Professor of Physics. He also served as Academic Program Director and as Founding Director of Perimeter Scholars International at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, from 2008-2014 and as Associate Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California from 2014-2016. John was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and he is a Fellow of the American Physical Sollciety.Brooks Harris received his PhD from Harvard in 1962. He was a post-doc at Duke University and at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in the UK. He joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, where he is now Professor of Physics Emeritus. Brooks was an Alfred P. Sloan and John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and, he is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2007, he was awarded the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society, "For his many contributions to the statistical physics of random systems, including the formulation of the Harris criterion, which has led to numerous insights into a variety of disordered systems."
