M. R. Dileep is a noted tourism academician, author, and columnist. Having been engaged in tourism academics for more than 20 years, he is currently the Director of the Kerala Institute of Tourism and Travel Studies (KITTS-Dept. of Tourism, Govt. of Kerala, India). Before that, he worked as the vice-principal and associate professor of travel and tourism management with Pazhassi raja college of the University of Calicut (Kerala, India). In addition, for seven years, he worked with the Ministry of Higher Education (CAS Salalah), Sultanate of Oman, as faculty, major head, and system-wide coordinator of tourism subjects. Moreover, he worked as the head of the Department of Tourism at KITTS earlier on government deputation for seven years. He published seven books and a number of research papers. Moreover, he presented papers in a number of international conferences and contributed columns/articles in travel magazines. Francesca Pagliara is Associate Professorin Transportation Engineering at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. During her Phd course, in 2000 she was visiting researcher at David Simmonds Consultancy in Cambridge. In 2002 she was research officer at the Transport Studies Unit of the University of Oxford; in 2006 she was visiting researcher  at the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems of ETH in Zurich and in 2013 she was visiting researcher at the Laboratoire des Villes Mobilité et Transports of the University of Paris-Est in France. She was visiting professor at the Transportation Research Group of the University of Southampton (2007 and 2009); at TRANSyt of the University of Madrid (2007 and 2010, 2015); at the University of Wuhan (2011); at the Department of Economics of the University of Valencia (2012); at the Institute for Transportation of the Technical University of Munich (2013); at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Ciudad Real in Spain (2016), at the Institute of Tourism and Sustainable Economic Development (TIDES) of the University of Las Palmas in Spain (2018) and at the Department of Tourism Management of the School of Economics and Management of the Beijing Jiaotong University (2019). She has been appointed as Adjunct Professor of the School of Economics and Management of the Beijing Jiaotong University for three years since July 2019.  Her main fields of research are the wider socioeconomic impacts of transportation systems investments (including High Speed Rail); the impact of the transportation system on the tourism market; Public Engagement in the transportation decision-making process; Transit-Oriented Development Policies and Integrated Land-use/Transport models. She is author of academic books both in Italian and in English and of more than 100 papers. She co-edited two books published by Springer. She participated at several research projects. She is the promoter of the International Workshop on High Speed Rail Socioeconomic Impacts since 2021.