Atefeh Mehrabi is a PhD student at ECE department of Duke University. She is co-advised by Prof. Sorin and Prof. Lee. Her research focuses in the area of computer architecture. More specifically, she is exploring and trying to tackle challenges of emerging reconfigurable accelerators. She got her B.Sc degree from University of Tehran in 2016 in Electrical Engineering and her M.Sc degree in Computer Engineering from Duke in 2018.

Karin Strauss is a senior principal research manager at Microsoft (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research) and an affiliate full professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (http://www.cs.washington.edu/) at University of Washington (http://www.washington.edu/). Her research lies at the intersection of computer architecture, systems, and biology. Her work includes hardware accelerators for machine learning, emerging memory technologies, and the use of biotechnology to the benefit of the IT industry. Lately, her focus has been on creating an end-to-end system that stores digital data in synthetic DNA, for which she was named one of the 2016 “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company. Along with Luis Ceze, she has recently received the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award for their work on DNA data storage. The DNA data storage project has also been chosen as “Best of What’s New” by Popular Science in 2016, one of the "Top 10 Emerging Technologies" by the World Economic Forum in 2019, and highlighted by influential publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, and Scientific American. Karin received her PhD in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007.