Kate Lorig is the Director of the Stanford Patient Education Research Center and Professor of Medicine in the Stanford School of Medicine. She came to Stanford in 1979 while a graduate student at Cal to develop and research an educational program that emphasized self-help skills for people with arthritis. This program became the Arthritis Self-Help Course, which is now offered to thousands of people with arthritis in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, South Africa, Scandinavia and elsewhere, and was the prototype for the Chronic Disease Self-Management Program, the Positive Self-Management Program for HIV/AIDS, the Back Pain Self-Management Program, and others. Dr. Lorig has authored several books and many articles about arthritis, chronic disease in general, health education and behavioral science.

My research activities encompass four main themes: 1) reducing health disparities through community-based interventions, 2) identifying, conducting research, and disseminating information on measurement and methodological issues in studies of health disparities and minority health, and 3) conceptualizing and measuring interpersonal processes of care - between patients and physicians - to be appropriate for patients with limited English proficiency and/or from ethnic/racial minorities.

Virginia Gonzalez has an interdisciplinary professional and academic background. One of Gonzalez's major areas of expertise is the development of multidisciplinary models explaining sociocultural and linguistic factors influencing alternative assessment, learning and developmental processes, and instructional programs in bilingual/English-as-a-second-language (ESL), low-socioeconomic status, Hispanic children. Gonzalez has conducted multiple research studies that have been published in the form of books and journal articles, have been disseminated at national and international conferences, and have been applied to the assessment and instruction of diverse learners in the public school setting and of international ESL students in higher education. These studies have generated alternative models and research methodologies, with important educational applications for the assessment and instruction of ethnic minorities. In light of this scholarly work, Gonzalez has been recognized as an outstanding and prolific scholar by major professional organizations in the interdisciplinary fields of second-language learning, bilingual education, and cognitive and language development. She earned a BA in psychology from the Catholic University of Lima-Perú; an MA in bilingual special education, and a PhD in educational psychology from The University of Texas at Austin.

John Lynch is a Professor of Epidemiology and Canada Research Chair in Population Health. He was trained in Australia and the US and received his PhD in epidemiology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1995. From 1997-2005 he worked in the Dept. Epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.