Gerry Philipsen is Professor of Communication at the University of Washington. He studies culturally distinctive codes of communicative conduct, and is the originator of the influential speech codes theory, an empirically grounded, testable, and tested scientific theory. Over the past thirty four years at the University of Washington he has supervised thirty four doctoral dissertations that, taken together, encompass long-term fieldwork in nine language varieties and nine countries. He teaches the arts of discussion, conciliation, advocacy, intercultural communication, communal speech, and ethnography. At the university he has been department chair, chair of the faculty senate, and secretary of the university faculty. Presently he is a conciliation officer for faculty-administration disputes and founding director of the university’s Center for Local Strategies Research. In 1984 he received the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award and in 2000 its first award for Faculty Distinguished Contribution to Lifelong Learning.