Nikos D. Lagaros is an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Thessaly and Research Associate of the National Technical University of Athens. His research activity is focused in the area of the optimum design of structures under static and seismic loading conditions using evolutionary and hybrid optimization methods. The optimum design problem of real world problems with multiple objective functions has also been a subject of research using specially tailored genetic algorithms and evolution strategies. He has more than 120 publications including 37 refereed international journal papers Yiannis Tsompanakis has received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the Department of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He is currently an Assistant Professor of structural earthquake engineering at the Department of Applied Sciences, Technical University of Crete, Greece. He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in structural mechanics and earthquake engineering and he is a supervisor of diploma, master and doctoral theses. He is a reviewer for archival journals and he has participated in the organization of several international congresses.