Haruo Kubozono is Director of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. His research interests range from speech disfluencies to speech prosody (accent and intonation) and its interfaces with syntax and information structure. He is the editor of The Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology (De Gruyter, 2015), The Phonetics and Phonology of Geminate Consonants (OUP, 2017), and Tonal Change and Neutralization (De Gruyter, 2018).
Junko Ito is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research in phonology focuses on the morphophonemics and prosody of Japanese as it pertains to word structure and its phonological form. More recently, she has been working on issues surrounding the syntax-phonology interface, and on the structure of the phonological lexicon and its implications for the theory of grammar.
Armin Mester is Research Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research is concerned with the principles organizing the prosodic structures found in language, as manifested in systems of syllabification, stress, and accent, and the mapping of syntactic and morphological structures onto prosodic form. He is pursuing this work in the context of Optimality Theory, with an additional interest in the basic architecture of the theory.