George Simons is president of George Simons International, a virtual consulting network specializing in intercultural communication and global team management. He is a member of the advisory board of the European Business Review and currently serves as a coach in the management development program of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

Dr. Simons is the creator of the award-winning )diversophy® games for developing intercultural competence in training rooms, for online e-learning and other new technologies (www.diversophy.com). He has most recently authored and edited EuroDiversity: a Business Guide to Managing Difference (Butterworth-Heinemann) which addresses cultural differences and challenges in the European Union. He is a co-author of Putting Diversity to Work (Crisp/Thomson Learning) and a contributor to the Cultural Detective™ series of intercultural guides (USA & NL). Articles, reviews and other publications by George Simons are available at www.georgesimons.com.

As member of the Board of The Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR) George Simons is enhancing the interculturalist’s role by developing professional standards and effective networks for its membership.

He speaks English, German, French and Spanish fluently, and has a basic knowledge of Dutch, Italian, Indonesian and Russian. He lives in Mandelieu la Napoule, France as well as in Santa Cruz, CA.

Jolanda G. Tromp, PhD. is a human factors consultant on the use and design of multi-cultural virtual teamwork systems. She has a BSc. in Psychology from the university of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a PhD. in usability design and evaluation of collaborative virtual environments from the university of Nottingham, United Kingdom. She is a certificed facilitator of Cultural Detective^®. She has been involved in the design and evaluation of collaborative virtual environments since the 1990s, working as a human factors research scientist on large, long-term international projects for and with academic and industrial partners. She is specialized in creating rapid usability evaluation tools for virtual teamwork systems and other types of novel telecommunication systems and devices. She did consultancies for British Telecom & 3D Vision Dome, 3D AvatarMe booth, British Government, the European Commission and others.

She is co-author on Cultural Detective® Global Teamwork and has published in the MIT Journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, the British Human Computer Interaction Journal Interfaces, the IEEE Journal on Computer Graphics and Applications, the British Telecom BT Journal, the Apple Computer Apple Newsletter, the Royal Dutch Telecom KPN Newsletter, the Journal of Intelligent Systems, the Dutch World Radio Service  and many conference proceedings.  Currently she lives in Spain where she advises mainly north European immigrants on cultural adaptation and integration issues via coaching, workshops and articles. She speaks Dutch and English fluently and is communicative in French, German and Spanish.