Allan Bird, PhD, is the Darla and Frederick Brodsky Trustee Professor in Global Business at Northeastern University, located in Boston, Massachusetts. His PhD (1988) is in Organization Studies from the University of Oregon. He received his MA (1983) in Comparative Culture and International Management from Sophia University in Tokyo. Allan’s primary research activities focus on global leadership development, with secondary interests in the assessment of global managerial competence and intercultural sensemaking. His more than 90 articles and book chapters have appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of International Business Studies as well as other academic and practitioner journals. Allan has authored or co-authored seven books. His most recent is Global Leadership: Research, Practice, Development (2008) with Mark Mendenhall, Joyce Osland, Gary Oddou and Martha Maznevski.

Robert Canfield, PhD, is Professor of Anthropology at Washington University. His PhD is from the University of Michigan. He has been interested in the developments in Southwest and South Asia since his ethnographic fieldwork in Afghanistan. His current research interests include recent developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the international geostrategic interests in those regions with the construction of gas and oil pipelines from those countries into other Cenral Asian countries. He has published numerous essays on Afghanistan including the recent "Continuing Issues in the New Central Asia" (2008), and the "Introduction" to Ethnicity, Authority, and Power in Central Asia: New Games Great and Small (2010). Other current essays regarding Afghanistan are "Fraternity, Power, and Time in Central Asia" (on the groups that joined the Taliban in the 1990s), and "New Trends among the Hazaras: From 'The Amity of Wolves' to 'The Practice of Brotherhood.'"

John A. Henschke, EdD, is Chair of the Andragogy Doctoral Emphasis Specialty, Instructional Leadership Doctoral Program, Lindenwood University (Lindenwood Univ. Andragogy). He is a Board Member of the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame (IACEHOF); a Visiting Professor of the Beijing Radio and Television University, Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC); Past President of the Missouri, USA / Para, Brazil Partners of the Americas; Past President of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE), also Chairing the Commission on International Adult Education (CIAE) of AAACE. John has been researching and testing his adult learning (andragogical) ideas in the USA and 15 countries around the world since 1970 (e.g., Canada, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Thailand, China, Australia, Mali in Western Africa, etc.); and has worked with adult educators and human resource development professionals in academia and the corporate world from 85 countries.

Lisa Haag Kang completed her BA degree in Chinese Language Studies at Washington University. She completed her MA degree in Chinese Studies at Washington University. She also finished a MA degree in Creative Writing at Lindenwood University. She has been teaching Mandarin Chinese, the History of China, Asian Religions, and Asian Philosophy at East Central College and Lindenwood University. Ms. Haag Kang has studied the Persian language in order to do historical research on the Mongols. She lived in China and did extensive travel and research throughout different regions of China.

Susan Brownell PhD is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara. She was also a nationally ranked track-and-field athlete (in the pentathlon and heptathlon) from 1978 to 1990. She was a six-time collegiate All-American while at Virginia and competed in the 1980 and 1984 U.S. Olympic Trials. Dr. Brownell combined her interest in sports with ethnographic research in China. She joined the track team at Beijing University and was chosen to represent Beijing in the 1986 Chinese National College Games, where she won a gold medal and set a national record in the heptathlon, earning fame throughout China. Brownell drew on her direct experience with Chinese athletics in Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic (1995), an insightful look at the culture of sports and the body in China. Along with Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Brownell edited a volume entitled Chinese Femininities/ Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (2002). She is also the author of Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China (2008) and editor of The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Race, Sport, and American Imperialism (2008), which won the 2009 Anthology Award from the North American Society for Sport History. In the year leading up to and including the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games she gave interviews about the Beijing Olympics to 100 journalists from over 20 countries, including NPR, CNN, Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS, BBC, Al Jazeera TV, The Wall Street Journal, AP, and others.

Ellen Carnaghan PhD is Professor of Political Science and Department Chair at St. Louis University. She earned a BA from Brown University, a Master of Arts of Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a PhD from New York University. She studied Russian language at Brown and at Columbia University. As part of her graduate studies, she conducted field research in what was then still the Soviet Union. Before arriving at Saint Louis University in 1993, she worked with the Soviet Coordination Group of Amnesty International USA. She conducts research in Russian politics, the politics of post-communism, and political change in many areas, including democratization and social movements. Her recent book, Out of Order: Russian Political Values in an Imperfect World (Penn State University Press, 2007) examines how the political values of Russian citizens have been shaped by the disorderly conditions produced by the political and economic transformations that followed the collapse of communism. Dr. Carnaghan has also written articles on popular attitudes in Russia and Eastern Europe that appeared in Comparative Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, Slavic Review, Democratization and Post-Soviet Affairs.

Zenia Tata is an International Development Consultant offering more than 18 years of experience in business development and program design for not-for-profit organizations and social enterprises. She has a proven record in securing funds to support high-impact initiatives and is proficient in designing and implementing customer-centered programs in rural and urban settings. Her work has spanned 14 countries in Asia, Africa and Central America. Ms. Tata also served as the Executive Director of International Development Enterprises (IDE) USA, an influential non-profit organization focused on income generation for poor rural farmers in Asia, Africa and Central America. During its 27 year life cycle, IDE has increased the income of 3.5 million families who were living on less than one dollar per day.