Sang-Seok Yoon, who earned the PhD in Korean Linguistics from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, joined the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures in 2012. The focus of his research is sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and second language acquisition. He specializes in linguistic politeness of the Korean language, and is one of the authors of the Integrated Korean Textbook series by the University of Hawaii Press, the most commonly used Korean textbook in the U.S.

Huiqiang Zheng joined UI in 2019. She has been teaching Chinese as a second language in universities both in China and the United States for more than ten years. In 2019 she was awarded university “Teacher of Year” by the Kentucky World Language Association. Besides teaching, Zheng has published articles related to Second Language Acquisition, Language pedagogy and Computational Linguistics. Zheng is active in the local Chinese community sharing her expertise in both Chinese pedagogy and Chinese folk dance.