Unicode® Technical Leadership

 

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

See also the list of Previous Unicode Officers and Staff.

	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 ran 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.
	Peter Edberg Technical Director 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.
	Ken Lunde Technical Director & Emoji Subcommittee Vice-Chair Dr. Ken Lunde worked at Adobe from 1991 until 2019, specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he developed East Asian fonts, along with the specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” and Google-branded “Noto CJK” open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, is the author of “CJKV Information Processing” Second Edition that was published by O’Reilly Media at the end of 2008, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s CJK Type Blog. Ken holds BA, MA, and PhD degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ken served as Adobe’s primary representative to Unicode from 2015 until 2019, serves as the IVD Registrar, participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, became a Unicode Technical Director in 2018, and became an Emoji Subcommittee Vice-Chair in 2019.
	Roozbeh Pournader Technical Director 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 Technical Director; ICU-TC 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.
	Ken Whistler Technical Director; Editorial Committee 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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