Professor Murty received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1982. From 1982 to 1987 he held research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Concordia University, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. In 1987, he was appointed as Associate Professor at the Downtown campus of the University of Toronto, and 1991 he was promoted to Full Professor. In 2001, he was deputed to the Mississauga campus to serve a two-year term as Associate Chair of Mathematics, and from 2004 to 2007 he served as the inaugural Chair of the newly-created Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the Mississauga campus. Twice he was Chair of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto Downtown campus (2008-2013 and 2014-2017).

Jianhong Wu is a University Distinguished Research Professor and Senior Canada Research Chair in Industrial and Applied Mathematics, York University. He is also the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in vaccine mathematics, modelling, and manufacturing. His expertise includes dynamical systems and bifurcation theory, that develops methodologies to identify long-term dynamic scenarios of an epidemiological system. He also pioneered a neural network architecture for pattern recognition in high dimensional data. This expertise, along with his interdisciplinary collaborative network, put him in a good position to develop a reciprocal linkage between public health and mathematics. Staring from the 2003 SARS outbreak, Dr. Wu has led multiple national teams to develop mathematical technologies to address key public health issues relevant to emerging infectious diseases including SARS, pandemic influenza, Ebola, antimicrobial drug resistance, and Lyme disease. He is currently leading the National COVID-19 Modeling Rapid Response Task Force.