Jody Heymann is Dean and Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Heymann was the Founding Director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University. Heymann's leadership in addressing working conditions and equity include founding and leading the Project on Global Working Families at Harvard University, establishing and leading the WORLD Policy Analysis Center which examines labor policy and disability policy as well as other social policies in all 193 UN countries, and directing training initiatives which brought students to over 25 countries to study effective approaches to improving working conditions and equity in a wide range of social spheres. She is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and held a Canada Research Chair in Global Health and Social Policy.

Michael Ashley Stein holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Co-founder and Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, as well as Cabell Professor at William & Mary Law School, he has taught at Harvard, New York University, and Stanford law schools. An internationally recognized expert on disability law and policy, Stein participated in the drafting of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, works with disabled persons organizations around the world, actively consults with governments on their disability laws and policies, and advises a number of UN bodies. Stein has received numerous awards for his work, and was recently appointed by President Obama to the United States Holocaust Council.

Gonzalo Moreno helped managed the Disability and Equity Initiative in 2011-2012 at the Institute for Health and Social Policy, which examined what policies and programs can lead to labor market improvements for persons with disabilities, with a specific focus on equitable, integrated and sustainable employment. Moreno now coordinates a large-scale international research and training project that seeks to understand how social policy affects infant, child and maternal health outcomes primarily in low- and middle-income countries.

Leif Atle Beisland is an associate professor at the University of Agder in Norway. He holds a PhD in capital market-based accounting research from the Norwegian School of Economics. His research covers both general accounting research and more specific research on financial reporting in the microfinance industry. He is also involved in several research projects on the use of microfinance services among persons with disabilities.

Susanne M. Bruyère is the Associate Dean of Outreach and Director of the Employment and Disability Institute, at the Cornell University ILR School. Susanne is Project Director and Co-Principal Investigator of numerous research, dissemination, and employer technical assistance efforts focused on workplace disability nondiscrimination. She has a doctorate in Rehabilitation Counseling Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association, Executive Board Member and Past President of the American Psychological Association Division of Rehabilitation Psychology (22), Past-Chair of GLADNET (the Global Applied Disability Research and Information Network on Employment and Training), Past-Chair of the CARF (Rehabilitation Accreditation) Board of Directors, and Past President of the American Rehabilitation Counseling Association and the National Council on Rehabilitation Education.

John Dattilo is a professor in the Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Management in the College of Health and Human Development at the Pennsylvania State University where he teaches about inclusive leisure services from an applied, philosophical, and ethical perspective. The overarching purpose of his research is to examine effects of services designed to empower individuals who are experiencing constraints to their leisure so that their lives become more meaningful and enjoyable. Professor Dattilo and colleagues have published their work in refereed journals as well as in edited and authored volumes.

Megan Galeucia is a McGill University graduate and is currently working towards her Master of Public Health at Columbia University in New York. She is interested in the intersections between social justice issues and health inequalities and conducting community-based participatory research. Galeucia was a fellow at the Institute for Health and Social Policy, where she researched employment barriers and opportunities experienced by people with disabilities and spent two months in London, United Kingdom conducting a case study on the Business Forum on Disability.

Laurie Gutmann Kahn, is currently a doctoral candidate in Special Education at the University of Oregon focusing in secondary special education and transition. Once a special education teacher in the Bronx, her experiences in the classroom contributed to her interest in equal access for youth with disabilities during transition from high school, as well as in culture and disability and teacher education. She is currently working on her dissertation examining the experiences and beliefs about the future for young adults with disabilities who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, or Intersex (LGBTQI.)

Anna Lawson is a senior lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Leeds and Deputy Director of the University's Centre for Disability Studies. Her research focuses on disability equality and human rights and her publications include Disability Equality in Britain (Hart Publishing, 2008), EU Non-Discrimination Law and Intersectionality (Ashgate, 2011, co-edited with Dagmar Schiek) and Disability Rights in Europe (Hart Publishing, 2005, co-edited with Caroline Gooding). She plays a lead role in a number of research projects and groups, including the Academic Network of European Disability Experts for which she is part of the international research co-ordination team. In addition, Lawson is actively involved in the work of various disability and human rights organizations - she is a current trustee of the Budapest Mental Disability Advocacy Centre and the Leeds Society for Deaf and Blind People, and a former trustee of the Royal National Institute of Blind and Partially Sighted People (RNIB).

Lauren Lindstrom is an Associate Professor and currently serving as Associate Dean of Research and Outreach for the College of Education at the University of Oregon. Over the last twelve years, Dr Lindstrom has directed or co-directed ten externally funded projects to develop innovative transition programs and improve post school employment outcomes for students with disabilities. She currently serves as Project Director for the Oregon Youth Transition Program, a collaborative program that serves 115 high schools and over 1400 youth, and as Principal Investigator for a research study designed to improve educational and career outcomes for young women with disabilities. Dr Lindstrom has published numerous curricula, training materials, and peer reviewed journal articles focused on topics of career development, post school employment outcomes, and transition services.

Stanislao Maldonado is PhD candidate in development economics from the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a visiting researcher with the Center of Development and Participation in Peru. He holds master's degrees in Economics from the Universidad de San Andres (Argentina and in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Berkeley. Before moving to California, he was a junior economist with the World Bank in Washington, DC, where he was working with the Department of Human Development for Latin America and the Caribbean on poverty, inequality, pension and labor market issues. In Peru, he was consultant with the Special Commission in Disabilities Studies at the Congress of Peru and has written several papers on labor market issues for people with disabilities.

David R. Mann is a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. His primary research interests include the labor force participation and benefit receipt of youth and adults with disabilities. Mann has worked on the designs and evaluations for several Social Security Administration initiatives, including Ticket to Work, the Benefit Offset National Demonstration, and the Work Incentive Simplification Pilot. Other ongoing projects include examination of the human capital and labor market outcomes of transition age youth with disabilities and evaluating three Medicaid managed care programs that primarily serve adults with disabilities for evidence of cost savings. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Roy Mersland is associate professor at the University of Agder in Norway. He has extensive international management, consulting and research experience in more than 20 countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. He is member of the Centre for European Research in Microfinance (CERMI) at Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management and he is the director of the Norwegian Centre for Microfinance Research. Over the last few years he has published extensively in journals like World Development, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Development Studies and Journal of Management Studies.

Sophie Mitra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Fordham University with research interests in applied microeconomics, including in the following fields: development, employment, disability and health, and agricultural commodity markets. Mitra is also the director of the Social Justice and Policy Research Unit of CIPS (Center for International Policy Studies) at Fordham. Mitra earned an MA in development economics and a doctorate in Economics from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne in France. Before doing her doctorate, she was a development practitioner and worked for the Overseas Development Institute in Fiji. Recently, Mitra has been studying the association between disability and poverty, and the economic impact of disability onset. Mitra has been published in peer-reviewed such as the American Economic Review, World Development, Applied Economics Letters and the South African Journal of Economics.

Daniel Mont is currently a Principal Researcher at the Leonard Cheshire Disability and Inclusive Development Centre at University College London. He has worked extensively on disability measurement and inclusive policies in developing countries, in particular in the areas of poverty, social protection, employment and education. He was a Senior Economist at the World Bank for 10 years, both in the disability and development unit in Washington, DC and in Vietnam where he also worked on rural anti-poverty programs, statistical system capacity building, and gender issues. He served as the Chair of the Analytical Working Group of the UN Statistical Commission's Washington Group on Disability Statistics and has published widely on disability and development issues. Daniel was a Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation Public Policy Fellow in 2003, and currently works as an independent consultant for UNICEF, The World Bank, AusAid, IDA and others. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his BA from Swarthmore College.

Joyojeet Pal is an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research covers a range of topics within the broad field of Information and Communications Technology and Development (ICTD). His ethnographic research on children's computer-sharing behavior in rural South India in 2007 led to the development of multi-mouse technology by Microsoft Research, a product for group-setting learning using multiple input devices. Since 2009, Joyojeet's work has been primarily focused on assistive technology and employability in low- and middle-income countries including India, Jordan, Peru, and Sierra Leone. His research looks at the impact of access to desktop and mobile assistive technology to the workplace aspirations of people with vision impairments, and contrasts this with the attitudes of employers towards hiring people with disabilities. He received his Bachelor's Degree at the University of Mumbai and his PhD in City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

Anthony J. Plotner is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of South Carolina. His primary research interests include community inclusion of individuals with significant disabilities: specifically, transition to college, supported employment, and collaboration across systems to promote positive student outcomes. He directs Carolina Life, an innovative, two-to-four year, post-secondary program for students with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, and also teaches a range of courses including courses that focus on individuals with intellectual disabilities.

Rienk Prins is a senior researcher/consultant at AStri Policy Research and Consultancy Group in Leiden, The Netherlands. Prins has coordinated various comparative studies in the field of social security, disability policy and labour reintegration, and he was the scientific coordinator to the project Who returns to work and why? A Six-Country study on Work Incapacity and Reintegration. He has carried out comparative studies in the areas of sickness and disability for the Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian government, as well for labour market and social security agencies in various countries. He has operated as a "thematic expert" in the EU Peer Review Programme on Social Protection & Social Inclusion, and has extensive international consultancy experience, mainly for the World Bank, on reviewing benefit programmes and building expertise on reforming sickness absence management, disability pension programmes and labour (re-) integration services.

Frank R. Rusch, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, is known internationally for his research related to transition from school to work. Over the past 30 years, Rusch has been studying how to utilize social capital to support individuals with disabilities after graduation from high school, how to structure transition services to promote meaningful outcomes, how to promote individual autonomy as a result of learning to direct one's own behavior, and how to utilize diverse methodologies in the study of socially relevant outcomes. Considered as one of the leading researchers in school-to-work transition, Rusch was the founding director of the Transition Research Institute at the University of Illinois and has authored over 200 books, chapters, and articles on topics associated with transition.

Ryoko Sakuraba is an Associate Professor at Kobe University in Japan. A graduate of the University of Tokyo (LL.B., LL.M., Ph.D.), she lectures in the subject of Labour Law. She was also a visiting fellow at University of Cambridge (2010-2012), where she researched employment discrimination laws from a comparative perspective, and has written extensively on Japanese labour law issues.

David C. Stapleton is a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, where he directs the Center for Studying Disability Policy. For more than 20 years his research has focused on the impacts of public policy on the employment and income of people with disabilities. He currently leads Mathematica's Disability Research Consortium cooperative agreement with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and is a senior investigator or advisor on numerous disability research projects, including: SSA's Benefit Offset National Demonstration; SSA's Ticket to Work Evaluation; and projects sponsored by the National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research under three Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers. Stapleton joined Mathematica in 2007. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin.

Robert Stodden is the Director of the Center on Disability Studies, University of Hawai'i at M?noa, and the past president of the Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD). Professionally trained in Psychology, Special Education, and Rehabilitation, Stodden has served more than twenty-five years as a national leader in the fields of special education, school to adult transition, postsecondary education, and employment for persons with disabilities. Since 1988, he has served as the founding Director of the Center on Disability Studies (a University Center for Excellence) and professor of special education at the University of Hawai'i at M?noa. He also serves as the originator and director of the National Center for the Study of Postsecondary Educational Supports and the National Technical Assistance Center for the Employment of Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders with Disabilities at the University of Hawai'i at M?noa.

Kali Stull is a McGill University graduate interested in social justice and public health, particularly in work related to food sovereignty. As a fellow of the Institute for Health and Social Policy, she spent two months in São Paulo learning about disabilities in Brazil and reviewing the experience of Serasa Experian's program for workers with disabilities. She currently resides in Mexico City, where she is improving her Spanish and researching native plants.

Sara A. VanLooy is a Research Assistant with the Employment and Disability Institute in the Extension Division of Cornell ILR school, where she has been providing research and writing support for over 12 years. She is currently working with the EDI Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Employer Practices Related to the Employment Outcomes Among Individuals with Disabilities , as well as on a study of the role of social networks in the employment experiences of people with disabilities.

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