Unicode Directors, Officers and Staff

Listed below are the current members of the board of the Unicode Consortium as well its executive team, technical directors, committee chairs and staff. Also see Unicode previous board members and Unicode previous officers and staff.

Board of Directors
	Harald Tveit Alvestrand, 2001 to present Google, Inc. Harald Alvestrand was born in Norway in 1959, and graduated from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in 1984. He has worked for Norsk Data, UNINETT (the University Network of Norway), EDB Maxware, Cisco Systems and, since 2006, for Google, Inc. Harald has been active in Internet standardization since 1991, and has written a number of RFCs. He was an area director of Applications and of Operations & Management in the IETF and a member of the IAB before serving as chair of the IETF from 2001 to 2006. He has been on the board of the Unicode Consortium since 2001.
	Julie Bennett, 2007 to present Microsoft Corporation As General Manager of Windows International, Julie Bennett is responsible for making Windows more relevant and tailored for worldwide markets. Julie joined Microsoft in August 1988 as a software development engineer working on various components within the presentation manager and then the kernel for OS/2. She worked as a developer to help with the shipment of Dos 5 before moving to the NT group in 1991. Julie has worked on various shell and user components and was one of the original developers who designed and created the globalization infrastructure we have today in Windows. As Product Unit Manager, her team designed and developed the initial version of Windows XP Starter Edition – the limited and tailored version of Windows for Emerging Markets. Julie holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Arts in Engineering from Brown University.
	Vinton G. Cerf, 2010 to present Google, Inc. Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company. Widely known as a "Father of the Internet," Vint is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet. In 1997, President Clinton recognized their work with the U.S. National Medal of Technology. In 2005, Vint and Bob received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It recognizes the fact that their work on the software code used to transmit data across the Internet has put them "at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment." From 1994-2005, Vint served as Senior Vice President at MCI. Prior to that, he was Vice President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), and from 1982-86 he served as Vice President of MCI. During his tenure with the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 1976-1982, Vint played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related data packet and security technologies. Since 2000, Vint has served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and he has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998. He served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992-1995 and was on the ISOC board until 2000. Vint is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum and the National Academy of Engineering. Vint has received numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet, including the Marconi Fellowship, Charles Stark Draper award of the National Academy of Engineering, the Prince of Asturias award for science and technology, the Alexander Graham Bell Award presented by the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, the A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computer Machinery, the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications Union, and the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, among many others. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and more than a dozen honorary degrees.
	Tatsuo L. Kobayashi, 1997 to present JustSystems Corporation Mr. Kobayashi has served on the board of Unicode for 3 consecutive terms. He is a member of the Japan Committee for ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2, and the chair of the Japan Committee for ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2/IRG. He has greatly contributed to pervade Unicode in Asia, especially in Japan, as the only Unicode director elected from an Asian country. He has played a major part in the cooperation and communication between ISO/IEC and the Unicode Consortium. As Director of the Digital Culture Research Center, he participates actively in the cultural strategies of JustSystems, mostly contributing in ongoing attempts to fuse lingual culture with technology. As an independent IT consultant, Mr. Kobayashi mainly tackles problems concerning Coded Character Sets and Digital Documentation. His network is amazingly extensive and he has access to various key players in the academic, business and IT fields. Mr. Kobayashi is also member of IPSJ/ITSCJ Standardization Committee for Coded Character Set, member of JSA Coded Character Set Committee, and member of CICC Multilingual Information Environment Committee.
	Marypat Meuli, 2006 to present Microsoft Corporation Marypat Meuli graduated from Lawrence University in Appleton, WI, with a Bachelor of Arts in both Chemistry and Mathematics/Computer Science. She obtained her Masters in Business Administration from IESE (Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa) in Barcelona, Spain, with an emphasis on international business. She is currently working in the Microsoft Office Division and has been with Microsoft for over 17 years, working in both Testing and Program Management. Previously she has worked in the Online Services Group and the Windows Division, and has extensive experience in internationalization.
	David Richards, 1991 to present OCLC David Richards served as CTO of The Research Libraries Group (RLG), with responsibility for all systems development efforts. He joined the organization in 1979 and was the architect of the systems and software engineering environment and designer of the database management software that powered the online service offerings of the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) for over 20 years. Among many other innovations, he pioneered non-Roman character support in library cataloging systems, including the development of three generations of RLIN multilingual terminal software. More recently, he led the migration of all of RLG's service offerings and internal systems from a mainframe with proprietary database and systems software to an XML database on an open systems platform and DB2. In 2006, RLG merged with the larger library cooperative OCLC. David was instrumental in managing the migration of RLG’s databases and applications to OCLC’s data center. Following that, he formed and led a California software development group within OCLC's Enterprise Development and Engineering Division. David has been a member of the Unicode Board since incorporation of the Consortium. He has also held positions as Manager of Database Systems Development at Tandem Computers, Inc.; Manager of Software Engineering at Processor Technology Corp.; Computer Scientist and Physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California; Research Fellow in Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology; and Associate Research Scientist, The Johns Hopkins University. David earned a B.S. in physics from Alma College, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Michigan. He also has a PMP Credential.
	Bill Sullivan, 2006 to present IBM Corporation Bill Sullivan has been a member of the Unicode Board of Directors since 2004. He has worked for the IBM Corporation for more than 33 years, the last 17 of which have been in the globalization and internationalization arena. During that time he has worked with thousands of software and hardware teams for products as diverse as PDAs and mass spectrometers. Bill is currently IBM’s company-wide Globalization Executive and is responsible for all aspects of product globalization; he leads IBM's worldwide team of globalization subject matter experts including the teams that develop the open source International Components for Unicode. Bill is a graduate of Fordham University, with post-graduate degrees from Trinity College Dublin and New York University. He served as Chief Strategist and a member of the Executive Committee for the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) for a number of years. Bill has also served as a member of the Executive Council of The Institute of Localization Professionals (TILP) where he chaired a workgroup on professional certification. Most recently he has been invited to be guest lecturer and Executive in Residence at California State University, Chico.
	Celia Vigil, 2006 to present Apple Celia Vigil is the Senior Director for Frameworks at Apple Inc. In this role, she is responsible for internationalization, fonts and multilingual support on Mac OS X. The team is responsible for delivering state-of-the-art text processing and layout technology, font management, Unicode support and fonts. These technologies are required to support the wide variety of languages used in Apple's global markets. Celia Vigil holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from University of California Davis and an MBA from Santa Clara University.
Executive Officers
	Mark Davis President & CLDR-TC Chair Dr. Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project and has been the president of the Unicode Consortium since its incorporation in 1991. He is one of the key technical contributors to the Unicode specifications. Mark founded and was responsible for the overall architecture of ICU (the premier Unicode software internationalization library), and architected the core of the Java internationalization classes. He also founded and is the chair of the Unicode CLDR project, and is a co-author of BCP 47 "Tags for Identifying Languages" (RFC 4646 and RFC 4646), used for identifying languages in all XML and HTML documents. Since the start of 2006, Mark has been working on software internationalization at Google, focusing on effective and secure use of Unicode (especially in the index and search pipeline), the software internationalization libraries (including ICU), and stable international identifiers.
	Mike Kernaghan Vice President & Treasurer Mr. Michael Kernaghan started working on the Unicode Standard in January of 1989 and became its first Vice President when the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in 1991. Later in 1996, he also took on the role of treasurer. Michael works at Microsoft Corporation in the Graphics Products Unit as a senior engineer, internationalizing their software for Windows and the Macintosh. He joined the Macintosh development group in 1997 as a lead developer in Text and I18N. He has a BS in Computer Science and Statistics from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1974. He worked at Control Data Corporation for five years providing real-time operating systems for large main-frame customers. In 1979, he moved to Diablo Systems performing 8080 programming on desktop PCs. After two years, he joined the Xerox team producing the STAR Workstation, first as programmer, and later on as a manager of a number of its desktop applications. In 1988, Mike was hired as the manager of Multilingual Development at Metaphor to address the need to change Metaphor products to be offered in the international market place.
	Lisa Moore Vice President & UTC Chair Ms. Lisa Moore has been active with the Unicode Technical Committee since 1993, contributing as a co-author to versions 2, 3, 4, and 5 of the Unicode Standard. She chaired Internationalization and Unicode Conferences for ten years, became a Unicode Vice President in 1996, and has chaired the Unicode Technical Committee since 1999. Lisa is a Senior Manager at IBM where she manages the globalization of IBM's Information Management (IM) products. Her organization leads the globalization and translation efforts at the Silicon Valley Lab (SVL) in San Jose, California, and she manages the adoption of new globalization features for the IM portfolio of products.
	Eric Muller Vice President Eric Muller is a software engineer with Adobe Systems, where he works primarily on text layout and font technologies. He has represented Adobe Systems to the Unicode Consortium since May 2000, and is the chair of INCITS/L2 since 2006. Prior to Adobe Systems, Eric worked for Mainsoft, Digital Equipement (at the Systems Research Center) and Schlumberger (EPS). He holds an M. Sc. in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Engineering degree from ESIEE (Paris).
	Michel Suignard, 2007 to present Vice President & Secretary Mr. Michel Suignard worked for more than twenty five years at Microsoft where he held various positions in the development and sales divisions. He was involved in the development of OS/2, Windows, and more recently Vista in areas such as globalization, coded character sets, and typography. He is now self-employed and is keeping an interest in standardization work such as coded characters set and International Domain Names (IDN). Michel is also the project editor of ISO/IEC 10646 which is the ISO standard aligned with the Unicode Standard.
Technical Officers
	Rick McGowan Technical Vice President & IUC Conference Chair Mr. Rick McGowan was appointed Technical Director of Unicode, Inc. in July 1992, then Vice President in 1998. He became Technical Vice President in 2011. In 2001, he joined Unicode as a Sr. software engineer and a member of its staff. Prior to that Rick was employed by NeXT Software, Inc. and subsequently Apple Computer, Inc. He joined Unicode, Inc. to provide dedicated technical expertise. Mr. McGowan has long been an active participant in the Unicode Technical Committee, and participated in the working group prior to the formation of the Consortium. He is now active in the development of proposals for the standardization of Scripts not currently included in the Standard. He is also Chair of the Internationalization and Unicode Conference.
	Deborah Anderson Technical Director Dr. Deborah Anderson joined the Unicode Consortium as a technical director in 2007. Prior to that she was involved in the Unicode effort as an invited expert then as UC Berkeley's representative to the Unicode Consortium since 2005. Deborah is a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and runs its Script Encoding Initiative (and its NEH-sponsored sibling, the Universal Scripts Project).  She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies.
	Peter Constable Technical Director Peter Constable grew up in eastern Canada and studied Applied Math at the University of Waterloo. He went on to studied in Linguistics and to work as a linguistics teacher and researcher with SIL International, including five years working in Thailand. While in Thailand, he was exposed to challenges of supporting non-Latin scripts in software systems and digital fonts. He began working on software internationalization in 1996 and became active in work on Unicode and other i18n standards activities shortly thereafter. Since 2003, he has worked for Microsoft on Unicode and support and international text display. He became a Unicode technical director in 2008.
	John Jenkins Technical Director John Jenkins is a Senior Software Engineer at Apple Inc., where his main responsibilities are to maintain and extend Apple's fonts and font editing tools. John has been involved in standardization for nearly two decades. He has been particularly involved in the standardization of East Asian ideographs and currently acts as Unicode's liaison to the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG). He first became interested in the computer representation of East Asian languages after spending two years as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Hong Kong. John doesn't dislike dogs, but he's definitely a cat person.
	Mike Ksar Technical Director Mike Ksar has been working in the IT industry for over 45 years. He is currently a Unicode Technical Director. He worked for Microsoft for more than five years in the Corporate Standards Strategy team and later as a senior program manager in the Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technology (GIFT) team. Before joining Microsoft, Mike worked at HP for more than 24 years. In his last assignment at HP, he was the Corporate Globalization Manager. He spent about 18 years in the area of internationalization programs and processes in R&D at HP product divisions and in the field, five years of which at HP in Geneva, Switzerland managing the development of localized products for Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Turkish, Portuguese and languages of Eastern Europe. Mike has been the Convener of the ISO technical working group (JTC1/SC2/WG2) that developed and published ISO/IEC 10646 since April 1990. He served 6 years as member of the Unicode Consortium Board of Directors. He is very active in both the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) as well as the Unicode Editorial Committee. He was a key player towards the merging of the first version of Unicode and ISO 10646 and continues to play a significant role in supporting the continued development, convergence and synchronization of ISO 10646 and Unicode. Mike has an MBA from Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California and a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.
	Ken Whistler Technical Director Dr. Ken Whistler is working at Sybase, Inc. in software internationalization and development, working to implement Unicode in database-related products. Dr. Whistler was formerly at Metaphor, Inc., where he helped design and implement the Unicode-based internationalization of the Metaphor Data Interpretation Systems. He has a BA in Chinese from Stanford University, 1972 and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, 1980. He pursued an early career in Sinology, learning both Japanese and Chinese in the course of studying in Japan and in Taiwan. His graduate work focused on the Native American languages of California, including an extended period of field work, archival work, and lexicography. He has developed and marketed text analysis software for linguists.
Technical Committee Chairs
	Helena Chapman ULI-TC Chair Helena S Chapman is Program Director of IBM's globalization technology team overseeing IBM globalization related technical investments. She is also the Chair of Unicode Localization Interoperability Technical Committee and founder of Localisation Industry Standards group of European Telecommunication Standards Institute. Prior to this position, she managed IBM's internal open source program and managed IBM's software division's customer satisfaction and quality management initiatives. She was the recipient of IBM's outstanding technical award for her work on internationalization support in Sun's JDK. In addition to her professional experiences at IBM. she held numerous technical lead and development positions at Taligent, Dataware Technologies and Apple. She received her MS in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts.
	Craig Cummings UTC Vice-Chair Craig Cummings is a member of Rearden Commerce's Globalization Center of Excellence. Before Rearden Commerce, Craig was at Yahoo! Inc., where he helped drive corporate technical strategy for internationalization with a particular focus on Middle Eastern markets. In a past life, Craig was a key member of Oracle's Applications Internationalization team where he worked closely with Sun's internationalization team to shape some of the pluggable locale, resource bundle, font, and supplementary character support in Java.
	John Emmons CLDR-TC Vice-Chair John Emmons has worked at IBM corporation for more than 20 years and is currently a senior software engineer. He has served as the lead globalization architect for IBM's AIX operating system, and also contributes as a member of IBM's ICU development team. His major areas of expertise are in operating systems development, and complex text layout technologies. Since 2005, John has been working extensively on Unicode's CLDR project, and is one of the principal editors.
	Kevin Lenzo ULI-TC Vice-Chair
	Uwe Stahlschmidt ULI-TC Vice-Chair Uwe Stahlschmidt has worked in the field of internationalization/localization at Microsoft since 1993. He spent most of his career in the Windows Team, taking on various roles in Engineering, Program and Project Management, Business Management, and has participated in every major Windows release. Uwe currently holds a dual role in the Windows and Windows Live Division: leading the International Business Management Function and managing an engineering team responsible for developing localization systems.
Staff
	Julie Allen, 1997 to present Sr. Editor & Project Manager Julie Allen has been involved with the Unicode Standard since Version 2.1, editing and managing various aspects of book and web publication for the Consortium. She earned a Ph.D. in Germanics from the University of Washington and an undergraduate degree in English and German from the University of Michigan. She works hard to translate long convoluted sentences into clear, precise prose and to keep group projects moving forward.
	Rick McGowan, 2001 to present Sr. Software Engineer See under Technical Officers above.
	Irina Shlyapnikova Office Manager Before joining the Unicode Consortium in December 2011, Irina worked as a High School Math Teacher for 8 years in Russia. She moved to the U.S. in 2001 and worked as an Executive/Administrative Assistant and Office Manager for companies including Zyltus Inc., Web Spider Technologies, and Yandex Inc.

 

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