Iris Varner is the Director for the International Business Institute and a Professor Emerita in international business at the College of Business, at Illinois State University, where she taught the cultural environment of international business and international management. Her PhD, MBA, and MA are from the University of Oklahoma. She has the Staatsexamen and Assessorenexamen from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany.

Varner has extensive international experience. She grew up in the former East Germany and studied in Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States, and Taiwan. She has given seminars and lectures around the globe, including New Zealand, Russia, France, Belgium, Japan, Germany, and China and has spent time in many other countries. She is an ad hoc professor at the University of Lugano, Switzerland, where she teaches in the Executive Masters Program for Corporate Communication Management and at Shanghai University, China.

Varner is the author of over 80 articles in the area of intercultural managerial communication. Her research, which she has presented at regional, national, and international conventions, has focused on the connections between culture, communication, and business practices. She has been honored with the Outstanding Membership Award and the Meada Gibbs Outstanding Teaching Award of the Association for Business Communication. She was named a Fellow of the Association for Business Communication and a Caterpillar Scholar and State Farm Fellow by Illinois State University.

As a president of the Association for Business Communication in 2000 to 2001, she contributed greatly to the internationalization of the organization. She was chair of the Ethics Committee and is an active member of the International Committee. Varner is a member of the Academy of Management and the Academy for Human Resource Development. She also serves as a reviewer for a number of scholarly publications and consults for a variety of national and international firms.

Linda Beamer is an Emerita Professor of California State University, Los Angeles, where she taught undergraduate business communication, intercultural communication, and diversity in the workplace, and courses in high-performance management and international business in the MBA. She received the honors students' Professor of the Year award in 2001, and in 2002 she received the Outstanding Professor award from her campus, followed by a Distinguished Woman award in 2005. She subsequently taught intercultural communication to undergraduate and postgraduate students at Unitec New Zealand, where she and her husband make their home.

She has taught and consulted in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, the Middle East, China, Argentina, Mexico, Hong Kong, Japan, and New Zealand. Her BA is from the College of Wooster in Ohio (with one year in Scotland at Edinburgh University), and her MA and PhD are from the University of Toronto. The latter led to dual U.S.–Canadian citizenship.

Her research, resulting in about two dozen publications and 70 presentations, has focused primarily on the effects of culture on business communication, with a special interest in Chinese communication issues. She has served on the Editorial Board of Business Communication Quarterly and was Associate Editor of the Journal of Business Communication; she frequently reviews for other publications as well. She served as President of the Association for Business Communication in 2004, as Chair of the Intercultural Committee of the Association for Business Communication, and as a member of the Board of Directors. In 2005, she was honored with the Fellow award. She was also voted a Fellow of the International Academy of Intercultural Research at its inception in 1997.

Beamer has been the recipient of several research grants and received the Outstanding Publication award from the Association for Business Communication. She held a six-year Visiting Professor appointment at Unitec New Zealand before moving to Auckland, and held a three-year Visiting Professor appointment at Shanghai University until 2009. She taught at Chuo University in Tokyo in 2004 and 2010, and has been a guest lecturer at many campuses around the world.