Diane August
Email: daugust@msn.com
Website: http://dianeaugust.com/

Diane August is currently a research scientist at the Center for Applied Linguistics, as well as an educational consultant located in Washington, D.C. At the Center for Applied Linguistics, she is the co principal investigator for a number of federally funded studies; one is an investigation of the development of literacy in second- language learners and the other is focused on the development of a measure of reading comprehension.

Margarita Calderón
Email: mecalde@aol.com
Website: http://www.margaritacalderon.org/

Margarita Calderón, Ph.D., is a professor and senior research scientist at Johns Hopkins University School of Education. Since 2004, she has been conducting research studies funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Since 2006, she has been working with New York City's Department of Education on the training of middle and high school teachers who have low-performing English-language learners in their classrooms.

Jim Cummins
Email: jim_cummins@tednet.oise.utoronto.ca
Website: http://www.iteachilearn.com/cummins/index.htm

Jim Cummins received his Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Alberta in the area of educational psychology. He is currently a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. His research has focused on the nature of language proficiency and second language acquisition with particular emphasis on the social and educational barriers that limit academic success for culturally diverse students.

Kathryn Lindholm-Leary
Email: klindholmleary@mac.com
Website: http://www.lindholm-leary.com/

Kathryn Lindholm-Leary received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at UCLA, where she worked at the Spanish Speaking Mental Health Research Center and the Center for Language Education and Research.  She is currently a professor of Child and Adolescent Development at San Jose State University, where she has taught for 20 years. Her research interests focus on understanding the cognitive, language, psychosocial, and societal factors that influence student achievement, with a particular emphasis on culturally and linguistically diverse students.

Laura-Ann Petitto
Email: petitto@utsc.utoronto.ca
Website: http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~petitto/

Laura-Ann Petitto is a Developmental Cognitive Neuroscientist, known for her discoveries involving the language capacity of chimpanzees, the biological bases of language in humans, especially early language acquisition (be it language on the hands in signed language or the tongue in spoken language), and bilingualism and the bilingual brain. Petitto is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, in Ontario, Canada. She is also the Director and Senior Scientist of The Genes, Mind, and fNIRS Brain Imaging Laboratory for Language, Bilingualism, and Child Development.

Otto Santa Ana
Email: otto@ucla.edu
Website: http://www.chavez.ucla.edu/osantaana.htm

Professor Santa Ana is on the faculty of the César Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. He has two research directions. As a sociolinguist he studies the interface of language and social structure, particularly the language setting of language minority peoples. Santa Ana also empirically studies on how mass media reproduces societal inequity. The American Political Science Association recognized his 2002 book, Brown tide rising: Metaphoric representations of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse, as the Best Book on Ethnic and Racial Political Ideology. Santa Ana has recently been exploring mass media humor. In a recent issue of Language in Society he analyzed a set of anti-immigrant jokes with which Jay Leno entertained his national television audience at the time of the Great Marches of 2006. Santa Ana argues that political comedy can be an insidious discursive practice that reduces its audience's critical judgment as it signifies social boundaries.