Unicode® Executive Officers and Staff

Toral Cowieson joined Unicode in 2021. More recently, she was the head of strategy and impact measurement at the Internet Society. She also held the leadership and learning portfolio, where her team set the vision and scaled online training and fellowship programs to reach NextGen leaders across 100 countries. Many of these technology and policy professionals are now contributing to the design, standards development, and governance of the core Internet infrastructure around the world.

Toral’s prior experience includes leadership roles as a board advisor and across non-profits and corporations, including Thomson Reuters.

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.

Anne is an experienced legal executive with 30 years in private practice and in-house legal roles. From 2013-2019 she served as vice president for global intellectual property for Swarovski, a global fashion jewelry brand based in central Europe. Before that she held various positions over a decade in the Intel legal department including vice president for global public policy, vice president for global sales & marketing legal affairs, and director of trademarks & brands. Early in her career she was an associate at Fenwick & West and director of trademarks at Sun Microsystems. Since retiring from Swarovski, Anne has been a consultant and has served as a World Intellectual Property Organization domain name panelist under the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy of ICANN.

Anne has long been a leader in the global IP bar. She served on the Board of Directors of the International Trademark Association for nearly a decade and served as the Association’s president in 2005. From 2006 to 2008 she served as chair of the Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights. She was one of the drafters of the U.S. Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006.

Anne has also long been a supporter of the Unicode Consortium and its work, providing pro bono IP counsel since the mid ‘90s. She is also a proud Gold Sponsor of the Comma (U+002C) and the Trademark Symbol (U+2122).

Gregg has been in the IT industry for almost 30 years. In that time, he has worked in non-profit, commercial and government sectors in consulting and in-house positions helping organizations streamline their environments and processes. He holds an MS in Information Systems from American University. In his spare time, Gregg plays in a band that plays in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and DC.

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.

Michelle was first introduced to Unicode in the early 2000s while working at Adobe as a member of the InDesign QA team. She later spent 8 years as a Program Manager in the Typography group at Microsoft where she managed font projects for a wide range of writing scripts. She represented Microsoft at Opentype, ISO and Unicode standards meetings. Most recently, she worked at Type Network, managing projects and helping clients with font licensing. She holds an MS and BS from Rochester Institute of Technology. She joined the Unicode team in 2024.

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.