François Cooren is Professor and Head at the Department of Communication, U of Montreal. A leading figure in the Montreal School of organizational communication who is equally at home in Language and Social Interaction and Philosophy of Communication, Cooren has played a unique bridging role among these fields that has enriched all of them. Early in his career, he received ICA Young Scholar award. Suffice it to say that he has more than lived up to that promise, as evidenced by numerous subsequent awards for his published works, top papers in several ICA divisions, and contributions to the discipline. He was President of ICA for 2010-2011.

James Curran is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, U of London and Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre. Author or editor of 22 books and over 80 articles and chapters, his expertise ranges widely across media and communication studies. There are few scholars who have done as much to integrate, enrich, challenge and extend the field’s scholarly landscape, and he has played a leading role in institutionalizing the field in the United Kingdom.  In 2011 he became the first winner of the Edwin C. Baker award for his lifetime research on media, markets and democracy, awarded by the Philosophy of Communication, and Communication Law and Policy Divisions of ICA.

Cees Hamelink is Emeritus Professor at the U of Amsterdam and the Free U of Amsterdam. He currently serves as Athena Professor of Globalization & Human Rights at the Free U, and Professor of Management of Information and Knowledge for Sustainable Development at the U of Aruba. A prolific, wide ranging scholar across his long career, he is a leader in communication throughout the world, but especially in Europe and its connections to the developing world, with a strong emphasis on human rights. He has received numerous honors and awards including two important ICA awards - the Intercultural and Development Communication Division Lifetime Achievement Award; and the association‐wide Communication as an Agent of Change Award in 2012.

Karen Tracy is Professor and incoming Chair of Communication at the U of Colorado Boulder. She received the National Communication Association (NCA) Dissertation Award in 1981 and was elected an NCA Distinguished Scholar in 2010. Across a career that spans these awards, she has developed an impressive record of scholarship. Her innovative work in discourse analysis has blazed a distinctive path that prioritizes both careful empirical analysis of local discursive practices and normative claims suggestive of ways to improve communication. An international leader in ICA and across disciplines, she has been uniquely responsible for cultivating important conversations among communities of discourse studies, language and social interaction, rhetoric, and argumentation studies.

Joseph Walther is Professor of Communication and Professor of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State U and a Fulbright Scholar. As a leading figure in the area of communication and technology, the hallmark of his work has been the combination of novel theoretical ideas with mainstream empirical research methods in studies of the relational dynamics of computer mediated communication. The exceptional quantity of citations to his work overall ranks him among the top five researchers in the history of communication studies. He has received several important awards including the first Communication and Technology dissertation award and NCA’s Charles Woolbert Award for research that has stood the test of time.