Kelly S. Bricker, PhD, is a Professor and Director of the Hainan University-Arizona State University International Tourism College, located in ASU's Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. She is also a practitioner in ecotourism and a consultant. She has applied research experience in the subjects of ecotourism, visitor and protected area management, and the impacts of tourism. She has authored books on sustainability that highlight case studies in tourism that meet environmental and societal issues, such as Sustainable Tourism and the Millennium Development Goals: Effecting Positive Change; on adventure education, such as Adventure Programming Travel for the 21st Century; and on graduate education, as in Demystifying Theories in Tourism Research. She completed her PhD at Penn State University, USA, where she specialized in sustainable tourism and protected area management.

Jacqueline Kariithi, PhD, is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist broadly working on the intersection of conservation and development, specifically addressing community livelihoods. She is in the process of starting a research center on the Kenyan side of the Mount Elgon ecosystem, addressing mountain social-ecological systems with a holistic model, including research, observations, capacity building, and connections to policymakers. She holds a PhD in Environmental and Geographical Science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Recently, she completed a postdoctoral research program in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA.