Chairs for Unicode® Technical Committees and Subcommittees

 

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

See also the list of Previous Unicode Officers and Staff.

	Deborah Anderson Script Ad Hoc Group Chair; Grant Management Committee Vice-Chair 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 runs its NEH-sponsored sibling, the Universal Scripts Project). She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies. She is Chair of the Unicode Script Ad Hoc Group.
	Annemarie Apple CLDR-TC Vice-Chair Annemarie is a program manager on Android at Google. She holds a B.A. in linguistics and Dutch studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
	Zbigniew Braniecki ICU4X SC Vice-Chair Zibi Braniecki is a Sr. Staff Platform Engineer at Mozilla working on Firefox Platform architecture. In this role Zibi is a peer of the internationalization module at Mozilla, a co-author of the Fluent Localization System and represents Mozilla at TC39 committee focusing on ECMA402.
	Shane Carr ICU4X SC Chair Shane Carr is a Senior Software Engineer on Google's i18n Engineering team. He is chair of the ECMA 402 subcommittee for JavaScript i18n standards and is a core contributor to the International Components for Unicode (ICU) project. His work on ICU has focused on locale data, number formatting, and performance optimization. Shane has previously presented on Zawgyi and on ICU number formatting at the 41st and 42nd Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC). He has also presented at the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). He holds an MS and BS in Computer Science and BS in Chemical Engineering summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis.
	Nebojša Ćirić ICU4X SC Vice-Chair Nebojša Ćirić is a TL/M of internationalization team at Google and vice-chair of the ICU4X Subcommittee. He is one of the founders and ex-chair of JavaScript i18n standard - Ecma402, which is a main driver of i18n on the Web. His personal i18n goal is to make Slavic languages better supported in standards and libraries. He holds B.S. degree from School of Electrical Engineering, Belgrade, Serbia and M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Florida.
	Peter Constable, Technical Vice-President; UTC Chair; Treasurer Emeritus; Compliance & Security Officer Emeritus Peter Constable is a Technical Vice President and the Chair of the UTC. Since 2003, Peter has worked for Microsoft on various projects related to Unicode, internationalization, text display and fonts. He became a Unicode technical director in 2008 and later served as Treasurer.
	Craig Cummings UTC Vice-Chair Craig Cummings has been working in the field of software globalization for over 25 years. Before his recent role at VMware, Craig worked with Informatica on big data internationalization and also worked at Zynga making games in a variety of languages including Arabic. Before that, at Yahoo! Inc., he helped drive corporate technical strategy for internationalization with a particular focus on Middle Eastern markets. Prior to that, Craig was with Oracle's Tools and Applications globalization teams 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.
	Jennifer Daniel Emoji SC Chair Jennifer Daniel is the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee chair. Her first contribution to Unicode was standardizing gender inclusive representations in emoji. As a designer, author and former graphics editor at the New York Times, she now explores communication and messaging through verbal, written, auditory and visual expression at a small ad company called Google. Jennifer is a co-author and illustrator of a number of graphics books including How to Be Human, Space!, and the Origins of Almost Everything. Her work has been recognized by the Walker Art Museum, Society of Illustrators and published in the New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine to name a few. She has had the honor to serve as a judge for the Society of News Design, Online News Association, Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, Data is Beautiful and the Art Director's Club. She lives in Berkeley California but also in cyberspace.
	Mark Davis CTO & Cofounder; 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 4647), 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.
	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.
	Rich Gillam CLDR Person Group Vice-Chair Rich Gillam has been working on software internationalization for more than 25 years, including stints with IBM, Amazon, and Apple. He’s currently a software engineer at Apple, where he works on the internationalization frameworks in macOS and iOS, including ICU, a project he’s been associated with off and on since its inception in 1998. He is the author of “Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer’s Guide to the Encoding Standard” and holds a bachelor’s degree in percussion performance from the Eastman School of Music.
	Andrew Glass CLDR Keyboards SC Chair Dr. Andrew Glass is Principal Product Manager in the Experiences and Devices Group at Microsoft. Since joining Microsoft in 2008 he has specialized in font rendering, keyboards, and input-related user experiences. He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington in Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies. He is co-editor of “A Dictionary of Gāndhārī” (gandhari.org, 2002–) and author of “Four Gāndhārī Saṃyuktāgama Sūtras” (University of Washington Press, 2007). His contributions to Unicode include proposals for the Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts, and Egyptian Hieroglyph Format Controls. Andrew is the author and maintainer of Microsoft's Universal Shaping Engine specification. Prior to joining Microsoft, he taught at the University of Washington, University of Leiden, and Bukkyō University in Japan.
	Josh Hadley Properties & Algorithms Group Vice-Chair Josh has spent the entirety of his 25+ year career working with fonts, text, tools, processes, and related standards, including Unicode since its early days. He has presented talks and tutorials at several Internationalization & Unicode Conferences about fonts and related topics. He is currently a Senior Computer Scientist at Adobe, where he develops and maintains open source and other font tools.
	Ned Holbrook Emoji SC Vice-Chair Ned Holbrook is a typographic engineer at Apple, specializing in text layout and fonts. He was one of the participants in the industrywide effort to standardize variable font technology in OpenType. He previously worked on wireless networking, virtualization, digital audio, embedded graphics, and remote filesystems.
	John Jenkins CJK & Unihan Group Vice-Chair 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.
	Jan Kučera CLDR Keyboards SC Vice-Chair Dr. Jan Kučera is a Research Fellow at University College London. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Human-Computer Interaction, while pursuing his interests in Indian studies at the Institute of South and Central Asia in Prague. He joined Unicode and the Unicode Script Ad Hoc Group in 2014, with special interest in the scripts of south Asia. He is the author of kbdlayout.info website mapping keyboard layouts in Windows, as well as the advanced text rendering engine for .NET Micro Framework.
	Ken Lunde CJK & Unihan Group Chair; Emoji SC Vice-Chair Dr Ken Lunde has been a Font Developer at Apple since 2021, and serves as one of Apple’s alternate representatives to the Unicode Consortium. He worked at Adobe from 1991 until 2019 where he specialized in East Asian type development, along with the development of related standards and specifications. His more notable accomplishments include the architecting and development of the Adobe-branded “Source Han” and Google-branded “Noto CJK” open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019; authoring and typesetting “CJKV Information Processing” Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009); and publishing over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken earned BA, MA, and PhD degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison; served as Adobe’s primary representative to the Unicode Consortium from 2015 until 2019; serves as the IVD Registrar; participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee; attends UTC and IRG meetings; serves as the Unicode Consortium’s liaison to CESI, CITPC, SAT, and VNPF; received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award; was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 until 2020; became a Vice Chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee in 2019; authored UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020; and became the Chair of Unicode CJK & Unihan Group in 2021. Ken and his wife enjoy driving their “His & Hers” pair of Tesla Model 3 EVs.
	Stanisław Małolepszy CLDR Message Format SC Vice-Chair During his tenure at Mozilla as a software and localization engineer, Staś drove the localization effort of Firefox and other Mozilla projects, and developed tooling and infrastructure for the open-source community of translators. He co-designed and then led Project Fluent, a localization system for expressive translations, and contributed to ECMA 402. Today Staś is a TL/M on Google Cloud. He continues to be involved in Unicode's Message Format Working Group.
	Mike McKenna CLDR Person Group Chair Mike is a Software Architect and Director of World Ready Engineering at PayPal and is responsible for next generation globalization frameworks. Mike has over three decades of internationalization and standards experience and has a background in global user experience design, application design, social games, systems engineering, database internals, and ethnographic research. Before PayPal, Mike has held globalization leadership positions at Zynga, Yahoo! (now OAuth), CommerceOne, and Sybase (now part of SAP), as well as consulting for several Fortune 500 companies.
	Daniel Minor CLDR Message Format SC Vice-Chair Daniel Minor is a staff software engineer in the platform internationalization group at Mozilla, and has contributed to the Unicode ICU4X and Message Format projects.
	Addison Phillips Message Formatting Working Group Chair Addison Phillips is the new Chair of the Message Formatting Working Group. Addison is also the chair of the W3C Internationalization Working Group and an active participant in the creation of internationalization standards such as Unicode. He is a co-author of IETF BCP 47, which is the standard for language and locale identifiers.
	Roozbeh Pournader Script Ad Hoc Group Vice-Chair Roozbeh Pournader has been working on internationalization, standardization, open source, and digital typography since 1994, when he was in high school. He started his internationalization career by adding Persian support to TeX. While studying Software Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, he founded and led the FarsiWeb Project that introduced and evangelized internationalization, Unicode, and open source in Iran. At FarsiWeb, Roozbeh led the development of two national standards, on information interchange (ISIRI 6219) and keyboard input (ISIRI 9147), which helped transition Persian users from old character sets to Unicode. Roozbeh received the Gold Medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 1996, founded the Persian Wikipedia in 2003, and received the Unicode Bulldog Award in 2009 for his contributions to Unicode’s support for complex scripts. Since moving to the US, he has worked as an Internationalization Engineer at HighTech Passport, Google (working on Noto, bidi, Android internationalization, and Google Fonts), and Facebook. He has been WhatsApp’s Internationalization Lead at Facebook from early 2018. Roozbeh has been formally representing various organizations to the Unicode Consortium, including High Council of Informatics (2000–2008), HighTech Passport (2009–2011), Google (2011–2018), and Facebook (2018–present). He is also the Vice Chair of the Unicode Script Ad Hoc Group.
	Markus Scherer Vice President; ICU-TC Chair; Properties & Algorithms Group Chair Markus Scherer is a member of the Google software internationalization team, focusing on the effective use of Unicode and on the development and deployment of cross-product internationalization libraries. Previously, he was manager, tech lead and software engineer at IBM. He has been a major contributor to ICU since 1999 and designed and developed significant portions of the character conversion, bidi, normalization, Unicode properties, and collation functionality. Markus is an alumnus of the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany.
	Yoshito Umaoka ICU-TC Vice-Chair Yoshito Umaoka is a software globalization engineer at IBM. He has worked on globalization issues in various software products including Lotus Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal Server. He currently works for ICU project as the project lead of ICU4J.

 

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