Unicode Directors, Officers and Staff

Listed below are the current members of the board of the Unicode Consortium as well its executive team 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.
	Carl Hoffman, 2004 to present Basis Technology Carl founded Basis Technology in 1995 to assist New England software publishers in localizing their products for the Japanese market. Since then, Carl has led the company to become the leading provider of internationalization technology and services to companies needing global support in their technology. Carl has been actively involved in helping Basis Technology clients realize their potential in global markets. He has provided management and technical guidance and is well respected in the industry for his dedication to quality products and services. In 2001, Carl was honored by the Massachusetts eCommerce industry association, Mass eComm, by being named one of the Mass eComm 10, an award given for outstanding achievement. Prior to starting Basis Technology, Carl worked as a consultant to Baring Securities, Carnegie Group, Intellicorp, Nichimen Corporation, Nikko Securities, Nippon Steel, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Progress Software, Toshiba Corporation, Toyo Information Systems, and the US Department of Defense. Carl was educated at MIT and was also a member of the research staff at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
	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’s been with Microsoft for over 12 years, working in the Online Services Group, the Operating Systems Division and the Information Worker Division. Marypat has worked in the field of internationalization during her entire career at Microsoft, working on both client and server products, and in both Program Management and Testing. She is currently a Group Program Manager for the Windows Live International Product Group, where she and her team work to provide international innovation across Windows Live.
	David Richards, 1991 to present OCLC Dr. Richards leads the California software development group of OCLC's Enterprise Development and Engineering Division. This was the core of RLG's development group before the company merged with OCLC in July 2006. The combined company offers products and services in support of libraries, archives, and museums worldwide. He has been a director of Unicode, Inc. since its founding. Prior to the merger with OCLC, Dr. Richards was chief technical officer of RLG, with responsibility for all systems development efforts. He joined RLG in 1979 and was the architect of the systems and software engineering environment and designer of the database management software supporting online service offerings for more than twenty years. Dr. Richards 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. Dr. Richards holds a B.S. in physics from Alma College, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Michigan.
	Bill Sullivan, 2006 to present IBM Corporation William J. (Bill) Sullivan has worked for the IBM Corporation for more than 30 years, the last 14 of which have been in the internationalization and globalization arena. During that time he has worked with hundreds of software and hardware products from laptops to mass spectrometers. He has also served as a globalization consultant to IBM solution and service providers supporting a broad range of industries. He is currently Program Director for Globalization and manages IBM's worldwide team of globalization subject matter experts including the team that develops the International Components for Unicode. Bill is a graduate of Fordham University, with post-graduate degrees from Trinity College Dublin and New York University. He is currently Chief Strategist and a member of the Executive Committee for the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA). 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 Director of the International and Text Group at Apple Computer. In this role, she is responsible for internationalization 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. The team is responsible for the technologies 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 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.
	Rick McGowan Vice President & Conference Chair Mr. Rick McGowan was appointed Technical Director of Unicode, Inc. in July 1992, then Vice President in 1998. 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.
	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 manages globalization for IBM's Information Management division. In this role she works on the strategy, design and implementation of globalized products. Prior to her involvement in internationalization, she worked for ten years in the development of networking and data communications products. She holds a BA in Mathematics from the University of Colorado.
	Eric Muller Vice President & UTC Vice Chair
	Michel Suignard, 2007 to present Secretary Mr. Michel Suignard has worked for more than thirteen years at Microsoft. He was first a Technical Manager in the newborn French subsidiary and moved after two years to the company headquarters in Redmond, Washington. He has worked in the Systems Division as a development manager in charge of globalization, with a specific focus on Far East products dealing successfully with Windows, OS/2, and Windows NT. He went back to Paris at the company European Head Quarter for a few years, managing European-specific standard issues, including character sets. Since then, he has returned to Redmond where he is a Senior Program Manager in charge of internationalization and typography within the Internet Explorer team.
Technical Officers
	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
	John Emmons CLDR-TC Vice-Chair
	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.
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.
	Magda Danish, 1999 to present Sr. Administrative Director Magda Danish joined the Unicode Consortium in April 1999 and has been managing the Unicode office since then. She handles all aspects of office work including administration, bookkeeping, meeting coordination, website maintenance, membership relations, and customer support. When needed, she loves to lend a helping hand to the often overworked Unicode editorial committee. Magda graduated from the "Université de Paris VII - Jussieu" in Paris with a degree in computer science (Maîtrise d' Informatique). She was born in Cairo, Egypt and speaks Arabic and French fluently.
	Rick McGowan, 2001 to present Sr. Software Engineer See under Unicode Executive Officers above.

 

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