Unicode® Fellows, Staff and Support

 

Directors | Executive Officers | Technical Committee Chairs | Staff | Org Chart

See also the list of Previous Unicode Officers and Staff.

	Julie Allen Editorial Committee Chair, Sr. Editor & Project Manager Julie Allen has been involved with the Unicode Standard since Version 2.1, writing, editing and managing various projects for the Consortium. During 2021 she served as chair of the Public Relations Committee. 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 on schedule.
	Elango Cheran Community Engagement Team Vice-Chair Elango Cheran is the Vice-Chair of the recently formed Community Engagement team and an internationalization engineer at Google. He actively contributes to the ICU and ICU4X projects, and to the MessageFormat Working Group.
	Toral Cowieson CEO 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.
	Peter Edberg CLDR-TC Vice-Chair, Unicode Fellow Peter Edberg has worked on internationalization, text and language support at Apple since 1988. He has been Apple’s representative to Unicode for many years, and has been actively involved since 2008 with the CLDR and ICU projects. Previously he worked in SRI International’s Bioinformation Systems Group and at a startup developing handwriting input systems for Japanese and Chinese. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Engineering Science from Caltech.
	Liang Hai (梁海) Editorial Committee Vice-Chair Liang Hai has been contributing to the Unicode Standard since 2016. His work focuses on improving both text encoding and font shaping for complexly encoded modern scripts, such as the major Indic ones and Mongolian. As a regular participant in the Script Ad Hoc Group, the Editorial Committee, and the UTC meetings, he is involved in both technical discussions and standard text editing. Since 2021, he has been the Multilingual Font Technologist and the “Unicode guy” at Typotheque.
	Steven R. Loomis Vice-Chair Infrastructure Committee Steven R. Loomis has been a member of the Globalization Center of Competency at IBM San José for over 15 years, where he is the Technical Lead for the International Components for Unicode for C/C++ (ICU4C). After discovering the world of internationalization during a temporary assignment to a bidirectional text project, he joined the ICU team in 1998. He assisted with the formation of the CLDR project, and continues to develop and maintain its Survey Tool data collection application. Besides speaking at IUC conferences, he has presented before the International Mac Users (IMUG), the Localization Certification Program of CSU Chico, as well as internal IBM events. His hobbies include Maltese language advocacy.
	Rick McGowan Vice President, Information Technology; Infrastructure Committee Chair Rick McGowan was appointed Technical Director in July 1992, then Vice President in 1998. He became Technical Vice President in 2011, then VP/IT in 2021. In 2001, he joined Unicode as a senior software engineer and a member of staff. Prior to that Rick was employed by AT&T Unix Pacific, NeXT Software, Inc. and Apple Computer, Inc. Rick 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 also Chair of the Internationalization and Unicode Conference Program Committee.
	Michel Suignard Unicode Fellow Michel Suignard is a Unicode Fellow. He served as Secretary for the Unicode Consortium from 2007 to 2020. He worked for more than twenty-five years at Microsoft, where he held various positions in the development and sales divisions, many involving development of the Unicode Standard. He is currently an independent consultant working on character encoding related matters, such as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and typography. Michel is the code chart editor for the Unicode Standard and is also the project editor of ISO/IEC 10646, the ISO standard aligned with the Unicode Standard.
	Ken Whistler Editorial Committee Vice-Chair Dr. Ken Whistler formerly worked at SAP in database software, implementing Unicode in database-related products and prior to that 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.

 

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