Lyle Campbell is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai‘i. He has been a visiting professor in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Mexico, Germany, Spain, and worked in New Zealand. He has held joint appointments in Linguistics, Anthropology, Behavioral Research, and Spanish. He is on 18 editorial boards, has published 21 books and c. 200 articles. He won the Linguistic Society of America's “Bloomfield Award” twice, for Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspectives (Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell, 1995), and American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America (1997). His specializations are: historical linguistics, documentation of endangered languages, American Indian languages, and typology.

Kikusawa Ritsuko is an Associate Professor of the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, and the Graduate University of Advanced Studies, Japan. She specializes in the historical study of Austronesian languages spoken in the Pacific, in particular the comparison and reconstruction of grammatical structures and the prehistory of Oceania through linguistic reconstruction. She has conducted research as a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University (2000-2002) and the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden (2006-2007). She is the current President of the International Society for Historical Linguistics (2009-2011). Her major works include: Proto Central Pacific ergativity (Canberra: Pacific Linguistics) and “Did Proto-Oceanians cultivate Cyrtosperma taro?” (People and Culture in Oceania).

Weera Ostapirat is an Associate Professor at Mahidol University, Thailand. He specializes in Southeast Asian linguistics, particularly on comparative phonology and historical reconstruction. His main interests are in the genetic relationships of the languages of East/Southeast Asian areas and the linguistic implications on the (pre)history and cultures of the respective people. His major works include Proto-Kra (Berkeley: Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area) and “Kra-Dai and Austronesian: Notes on the phonological correspondences and vocabulary distribution” (The peopling of East Asia: Putting together archaeology, linguistics, and genetics). His past experience includes a research visit at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, in 2000-2001. He currently visits the Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, for an investigation on the linguistic relationship between Tai and Chinese.

Thomas Pellard is a Post-doctoral Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), associated with Kyoto University. He specializes in descriptive and historical linguistics of the Japonic languages (Japanese and Ryukyuan, spoken in the islands between mainland Japan and Taiwan). He is pursuing extensive fieldwork on the phonology and grammar of several endangered Ryukyuan languages, and is also actively working on the comparison of Ryukyuan and Japanese in order to reconstruct their common ancestor and the historical developments of the different Japonic languages.

Lawrence Reid is an Emeritus Researcher with the University of Hawai‘i where he taught for more than 30 years. His primary interests are in the historical development of Austronesian languages, in particular those spoken in the Philippines. He has published extensively on the phonology, morphology and syntax of various Philippine languages, many of which are available on his website. He has also published on the possible wider genetic relationships of Austronesian languages, including Austro-Asiatic and Austro-Tai. He has been a fellow of the Ford Foundation and has held visiting research appointments at Universities in New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. He currently lives in Japan.

Martine Robbeets combines a research position in linguistics at the University of Leuven in Belgium with a research fellowship at the University of Mainz in Germany. Her research is on the distinction between the effects of contact and inheritance in linguistic change, morphological reconstruction, the linguistic origins of Japanese, and the historical relationships among the Transeurasian or so-called “Altaic” languages. Her publications include Is Japanese related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic? (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz) and “Transeurasian: Can verbal morphology end the controversy?” (In Johanson and Robbeets (eds.) 2010). In the past she has held a research appointment in Leiden (Netherlands) and visiting scholarships in Tokyo and Mainz.

Laurent Sagart is a senior scientist with CNRS, the French National Center for Scientific Research. He has published widely in Chinese and East Asian historical linguistics. In collaboration with W. H. Baxter, he has recently produced a new reconstruction of Old Chinese. He is interested in language classification, notably the internal classification of Austronesian, Sinitic and Sino-Tibetan, in the genetic relationships among East Asian language groups, and in East Asian linguistic prehistory. His main works include The roots of Old Chinese (Benjamins) and “The higher phylogeny of Austronesian and the position of Tai-Kadai” (Oceanic Linguistics).

J. Marshall Unger is a Professor at Ohio State University where he chaired the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures from 1996 to 2004, having previously chaired departments at the University of Hawai‘i and the University of Maryland. His research has focused on the history of Japanese, teaching Japanese as a second language, and the writing systems of East Asia. He has been a fellow of the Ford Foundation, Japan Foundation (twice), and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Two of his books, The fifth generation fallacy and Literacy and script reform in Occupation Japan, are available in Japanese.

Alexander Vovin is a Professor of East Asian Languages at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, is a historical linguist and philologist specializing in Japanese, Ainu, Ryukyuan, Korean, and Inner Asian languages. His recent publications include: Man'yōshū, Book 15 and Book 5: A new English translation containing the original text, kana transliteration, romanization, glossing and commentary (Folkestone: Global Oriental), Koreo-Japonica: A re-evaluation of a common genetic origin (University of Hawai‘i Press); A descriptive and comparative grammar of Western Old Japanese (Folkestone: Global Oriental); and Ryukyuan, Old Japanese, and neighboring languages: Problems of contacts and reconstruction (Nihon kenkyū).

John Whitman is a Professor of Linguistics at Cornell University and Visiting Professor at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tokyo. He works on historical/comparative linguistics, language typology, and syntactic theory, with a primary focus on the languages of East Asia. He has published on the diachronic syntax, phonology, and morphology of Japanese, modern Japanese syntax, Korean syntax, and the diachronic syntax of Chinese. His current research is on the principles of syntactic change. His publications include Proto-Japanese (with B. Frellesvig, Benjamins, 2008), and Person and active typology-from the standpoint of the pronominal system of Old Japanese (with Y. Yanagida, 2009. In The linguistics of “inside” and “outside”, ed. by A. Tsubomoto, et al, 175-216. Kaitakusha [in Japanese]).