New Unicode Technical Director

Roozbeh PournaderThe Unicode Consortium would like to welcome a new
Technical Director, Roozbeh Pournader.

Roozbeh Pournader has been working on internationalization,
standardization, open source software, and digital typography since
1994, when he was in high school, where he also participated in
scientific olympiads and received several medals, including the Gold
Medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, 1996.

He started his internationalization career by adding Persian support to
Donald Knuth’s typesetting system, TeX. Later, while studying Software
Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, he founded the FarsiWeb
Project that introduced and evangelized internationalization, Unicode,
and open source in Iran. At FarsiWeb, Roozbeh led the development of two
national Iranian standards, on information interchange (ISIRI 6219) and
keyboard input (ISIRI 9147), which helped transition Persian users from
old character sets to Unicode. To this day, FarsiWeb alumni, trained by
Roozbeh, continue to work in the internationalization field at major
tech companies.

Roozbeh founded the Persian Wikipedia in 2003 and received the Unicode
Bulldog award in 2009 for his contributions to Unicode and CLDR’s
support for complex scripts. Since moving to the United States, he has
worked as an Internationalization Engineer at HighTech Passport, Google
(working on Noto fonts, bidirectional support, 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.

For the listing of current directors and officers of the Consortium
please see Unicode Directors, Officers and Staff
<http://www.unicode.org/consortium/directors.html#exeofficers>

http://blog.unicode.org/2020/01/new-unicode-technical-director.html

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