Dr. Lourdes Ortega is a Professor of Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. A widely published scholar and frequent plenary speaker at international conferences, she is best known for her award-winning meta-analysis of L2 instruction in 2000, her best-seller textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition and for championing a bilingual turn in second language acquisition.

Born, raised, and college-educated in southern Spain, Lourdes obtained her doctorate in the United States, where she has lived and worked since 1993. Her bilingual life in English-Spanish is enriched by several other languages, particularly Greek, which was once her strongest language.

Dr. Jean-Marc Dewaele is a Professor of Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a keen walker, karate-ka and author of Emotions in Multiple Languages (2010). He is President of the International Association of Multilingualism and former president of the European Second Language Association. He is General Editor of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.

Dewaele won the Equality and Diversity Research Award from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (2013) and the Robert Gardner Award for Excellence in Second Language and Bilingualism Research (2016) from the International Association of Language and Social Psychology.