Chuanren Ke (柯传仁) is Professor in the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Second Language Acquisition PhD Program (aka FLARE, Foreign Language Acquisition Research and Education) in the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Iowa. His main area of research is in Chinese second language acquisition, instruction, and assessment. 

Philip Lutgendorf taught Hindi and Modern Indian Studies in the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literature for 33 years, retiring in 2018.

Margaret H. Mills was a Professor of Russian language and linguistics and the former Chair of the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages at the University of Iowa. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan (1985) and her MPH from the University of Iowa (2005). She has spent 30 years studying, consulting, and conducting linguistic and public health field work and research in the Soviet Union and Russia.

Helen Shen's main research areas are Chinese L2 literacy development focusing on orthographic knowledge development and cognitive process of Chinese characters, reading education in Chinese, and instructional theories in teaching Chinese as a second language.

Frederick Smith's primary interest lies at the intersection of text and practice, in what gives cultural and religious traditions their dynamism. As a scholar of Sanskrit and South Asia, his work includes studies of texts and performances of Vedic sacrificial ritual from antiquity to the present; studies of religious experience in India, with a primary focus on the history and phenomenology of deity and spirit possession; the writings of Vallabhācārya; and India’s great epic, the Mahābhārata.