Dr Kate Swinburn is a speech and language therapist and freelance academic. She worked in the NHS and in the charity sector each for 10 years. In the NHS she worked with adults with neurological impairments. At Connect Kate was responsible for training, publications, and national policy. Her academic interests focus on people with acquired communication disability (particularly those with aphasia and dementia), working alongside them during co-produced projects, integrating the social model of disability into the research agenda, especially into outcome measurement. She is a member of the international network Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists supporting the adaptation of both the Comprehensive Aphasia Test and the Aphasia Impact Questionnaire into multiple languages (currently 28). She is an honorary lecturer at University College London and a Fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Gillian Porter is a Speech and Language Therapist who has worked solely in the NHS. As well as her clinical work she has been the service lead for Speech & Language Therapy across acute, and community services, and county-wide professional lead for Speech and language Therapy. Her special interest is working with adults with neurological disorders.

Professor David Howard is both a speech and language therapist and cognitive neuropsychologist. His research is on the cognitive neuropsychology of language, including written and spoken word comprehension and production as well as syntactic processing. Drawing data from both data from people with aphasia, and normal participants and brain imaging he wants to develop good computational models of word processing. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.