Unicode® Board of Directors

Ayman was most recently the Group Engineering Manager of the Office Core Experiences team responsible for the shared components that Office use to build their applications, including UX, UI platform, text rendering and editing, font management and accessibility. Prior to this, Ayman managed different internationalization teams that built the globalization and localization platform for Office applications, including multilingual and machine translation features. Ayman started at Microsoft in 1990 as a software design engineer and worked on BiDirectional enabling of some of Microsoft key products including DOS, Windows, IE, Word and PowerPoint. Ayman holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from University of Arizona.

Tim has over 19 years of experience in the globalization industry, working in an internationalization capacity for companies like Apple, Vivendi Universal, and most recently Netflix. He has built and lead the internationalization team at Netflix for over 6 years, taking the Netflix product from a US only service to a truly global product available in 190 countries and 27 languages. Much of his work at Netflix has revolved around innovation to support globalization at scale. Tim has a software engineering background, holding a degree in Computer Science.

Kulpreet Chilana has worked in software localization at Apple for 8 years and has 12+ total years of experience in the localization and internationalization industry. He is passionate about using all parts of the software stack to preserve the richness of human culture—from high-level font development, text input modes and multilingual support to low-level machine translation models, text-shaping and compile-time localization diagnostics.

He currently manages a team of software engineers that evangelize localization across Apple’s platforms, build features for Apple’s international users and own the localization infrastructure in Xcode. Kulpreet holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Dr. Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project. He was the president of the Unicode Consortium from its incorporation in 1991 until the end of 2022, and has presided over the board of directors since incorporation. Having held positions at IBM and Apple, Mark joined Google in 2006 where he has been working on software internationalization 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.

Brent Getlin is the Director of Product Development and General Manager for Adobe Fonts and Type at Adobe. His passion for visual communication and technology drove him to study both film at Northwestern University and Computer Engineering at Southern Methodist University. Prior to his work with Fonts and Type, Brent managed Adobe's mobile gaming engineering team, led engineering for the Macromedia Flash video encoder, and co-authored W3C's SVG 1.0 Specification and the ActionScript 3.0 language standard.

Brent holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering with a Computer Graphics specialization from Southern Methodist University.

Salvatore “Salvo” Giammarresi is Head of Localization @ Airbnb. Previously he has held global leadership roles at several technology companies in Silicon Valley including PayPal and Yahoo. Salvo holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Palermo (Italy), where he laterwas a visiting professor, teaching localization.

He is a published author/speaker on the topics of localization, internationalization, global program management, international product management, formulaic language, machine translation, translation studies and translation memory systems.

Salvo is a Board Member @Clear Global (formerly known as Translators without Borders) and an advisor to a few startups.

Bob is the Director of Engineering for Internationalization at Google. He built and leads the globally distributed team that develops highly scalable technologies and infrastructure used throughout Google to deliver internationalized and localized products. Previously, at Netscape, he built the team that established much of the early work on internationalization for the web and browsers. Even earlier, he helped drive the initial Unix/POSIX internationalization specifications and standards via work with industry consortiums (/usr/grp, Uniforum, Unix International). Prior to Google, Bob worked for Netscape/AOL, Apple, MIPS, Nippon Unisoft and UniSoft. He holds a Bachelors in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Teresa Marshall is Vice President, Globalization at Salesforce, where she is responsible for product globalization and localization. Over the last 20 years, she has held leadership positions in a number Silicon Valley companies, including at Google. Teresa previously served as an adjunct member of the faculty at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS) and on the Board of Directors of Women in Localization.

Teresa holds an MA in Translation & Interpretation from Middlebury Institute. An active member of the localization community, she has been the organizer and cohost of the annual Localization Unconference in Silicon Valley since 2009.

Iris Orriss serves as Vice President of Internationalization, Product Quality, and Product Experience Analytics at Meta. She has been with Meta since 2013 and is passionate about eliminating the internet language and cultural barriers and improving the overall user experience. Her work focuses on growing Meta in international markets. From 2012 – 2019 Iris was a member of the board at Translators without Borders, a nonprofit organization that provides vital information in the right language at the right time. Prior to Meta, Iris was a director at Microsoft working on product internationalization and development process in the enterprise and language technology divisions. She is a native of Germany, speaks four languages, and was educated at Freie Universität Berlin.

Cathy Wissink is a 30-year veteran of the global tech industry. Most of her career was spent at Microsoft, with her early tenure devoted to internationalization support for Windows. She then spent 15 years working focused on global government and regulatory affairs. In her most recent role at Microsoft, Cathy managed a part of Microsoft's standards portfolio supporting regulatory needs in forums like ISO/IEC JTC1, CEN/CENELEC, NIST, and also led Microsoft's product certification process for China.

Cathy led Microsoft's participation in the Unicode Technical Committee from 2000-2005, and served as UTC vice-chair and INCITS/L2 chair from 2002-2005.