John Frederick Bailyn is Professor of Linguistics at Stony Brook University, where he teaches general linguistics, syntax, language and politics, and Slavic linguistics. His research involves investigations of the workings of the linguistic component of the mind, with particular attention to the syntax of Slavic languages.  Within theoretical linguistics, his primary interests lie in generative syntax, especially issues of case, word order, morpho-syntax, and constraints on movement. Within Slavic Linguistics, he is interested in Russian syntax, morphology, and phonology, comparative Slavic syntax, and historical linguistics. Within cognitive science, he is interested in issues of modularity, creativity, evolution, and musical cognition. 

JFB is also the co-founder and co-Director of The NYI Global Institute of Cultural, Cognitive, and Linguistic Studies, founded in 2003 as the NY-St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture (NYI), and entering its 12th virtual session in 2026 after 17 years in-person.

Outside academia, JFB is a strong advocate for minority rights, self-determination of peoples, mutli-lingualism, hard-copy reading, and eliminating penalty kicks from the rules of world soccer (football), of which he is a lifelong player and fan. 

He holds a PhD in Linguistics from Cornell University.

Hanna Filip is Professor of Semantics at Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf. Her research is motivated by her long-standing interest in conceptual foundations of semantics, drawing on the logical/formal and cognitive research traditions. Her main focus is on aspect, genericity, mass/count distinction, mereological semantics, interaction of noun phrase semantics with verbal aspect, (in)definiteness, context-dependence in semantic interpretation, integration of formal and lexical semantics. Languages from which she often tends to draw her data are English, German, Czech, Russian, Polish, French and Italian.  

H. Filip received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. Her thesis advisors were Paul Kay, Charles J. Fillmore, Sam Mchombo and Alan Timberlake. Her thesis, entitled Aspect, Eventuality Types and Noun Phrase Semantics, was published in the OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS IN LINGUISTICS series, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Before Düsseldorf, she taught at Stanford, Northwestern, and Rochester, and worked as a computational linguist at SRI International and ICSI Berkeley. She has also taught numerous prestigious summer school courses (e.g., LSA, ESSLLI, LOT). Her research has been supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft/DFG), German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst/DAAD), Strategic Research Fund of Heinrich Heine University (Strategischer Forschungsfonds), Humanities Scholarship Enhancement Fund at the University of Florida, and University of California at Berkeley Fellowship, among others.

Currently, she serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Slavic Linguistics and is on the Editorial Board of Semantics and Pragmatics.

Motoki Nomachi has been analyzing grammatical structures in the Slavic languages from the viewpoints of language typology, language contact (areal linguistics), and historical linguistics. He began his scholarly career as a specialist in Russian, particularly its syntax. During his M.A., M. Nomachi began examining two South Slavic languages, BCMS and Slovene, in the context of contrastive linguistic analysis of Russian and South Slavic. Since working on his Ph.D. thesis, he has been interested in and intensively studying grammatical changes in minority Slavic languages, focusing particularly on Kashubian, which is spoken mainly in Pomeranian Voivodeship in the northern part of Poland.

In addition, M. Nomachi is a sociolinguist and specializes in language policy, language planning, and linguistic landscape from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. He is specifically interested in the so-called Slavic literary microlanguages and until now, he has conducted numerous field studies on Kashubian and Podlachian (Poland), Burgenland Croatian (Austria), Banat Bulgarian (Serbia and Romania), Bunjevac (Serbia), West Polessian (Belarus and Ukraine), Gorani (Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania) and other areas. 

Furthermore, he has been an active organizer of various international conferences on Slavic linguistics, including SLS-17 (2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2022, 2024a, and 2024b).