Anushah Hossain is the Research Director of the Script Encoding Initiative and a historian of technology. Her work explores the history of Indic script encodings and the development of the Unicode Standard. At SEI, she leads efforts to develop proposals for the inclusion of historic and contemporary minority scripts in the Unicode Standard. She continues to pursue research on the broader histories and politics of text technologies. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley in Energy and Resources, where she focused on internet infrastructures.

Deborah (Debbie) Anderson founded SEI in 2002 to assist communities getting their script and characters into the Unicode Standard. She is currently Vice Chair of the Unicode Script Encoding Working Group, which reviews all non-emoji and non-CJK ideograph Unicode proposals. In addition, she is International Representative for the US National Body to the ISO subcommittee on Coded Character Sets. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies (linguistics emphasis). 

Anshuman Pandey is a longstanding contributor to the Unicode Standard and expert in script proposals. He completed Ph.D in History at the University of Michigan and since 2005 has been developing Unicode standards for scripts of south, south-east, and central Asia.

Helena Kansa is the Program Manager of the Script Encoding Initiative. She is a recent graduate of the University of California, Irvine, and has a background in linguistics, anthropology, and foreign languages such as Italian and Arabic. In her role at SEI, Helena provides administrative and logistical support, oversees special projects like the script status database, and advances new initiatives like the SEI fieldwork fellowship.

Kyra Ann Dawkins is a writer, researcher, and MFA student in Creative Writing at Columbia University. She is the author of The We and the They, a debut dystopian oral history novel. Her work with the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) combines her interests in language access, storytelling, and digital equity. Kyra manages SEI’s blog and contributes to grant writing and research.

Logan Simpsin is a linguist specialising in endangered Indigenous languages and writing systems, focusing on newly invented scripts. His research examines the interplay between language, culture, and script, particularly how writing systems support linguistic preservation and cultural identity. He explores sociolinguistic factors shaping the adoption of new scripts, including proposals for Unicode encoding. He studies how communities adopt scripts for previously unwritten languages or replace existing ones. He is currently pursuing a PhD on this topic, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) Doctoral Training Studentship.

Ariq Syauqi is an Indonesian type designer specialising in multiscript typography, especially for underrepresented ones. After earning a master’s degree in Typeface Design from the University of Reading with distinction, he is currently honing his research skills in Nancy, France, at the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique. He independently releases original fonts through Marsnev & Co. and collaborates as a freelancer with renowned designers, including Fred Smeijers and JamraPatel. Eager to deepen his exploration of world scripts, Ariq will soon start his PhD in Leiden, where he will examine Indonesian scripts through the typographic lens.

Adam YEO is a graphic and type design scholar and faculty at Université de Bondoukou, Côte d’Ivoire. He holds a PhD from Nanjing University of the Arts in China and focuses on African script typeface design and Latin typefaces based on African scripts or symbols. In his research, he has been particularly engaged with the Bété script — an unencoded writing system from Côte d’Ivoire, which he aims to help preserve and promote at a digital level in the digital age. He is leading several projects that blend culture, identity, and design. He can speak at international conferences on type design, writing systems, and cultural identities.

Isabelle Zaugg is a Research Associate at SEI. She earned her PhD in Communication from American University and completed her Postdoctoral research at Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Columbia Data Science Institute. Her research focus is language justice in the digital sphere, with a particular focus on languages written in the Ethiopic script. She has researched the relationship between Unicode and script communities and has written and presented on the important role of grassroots intermediaries such as SEI, that bridge user communities and Internet governance institutions.

Alexandre Bassi is an independent French type designer. He obtained a master’s degree in type design from the École de Communication Visuelle in Paris, and then undertook a research period at the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique in Nancy, France. His practice is structured around three axes: type design, research, and teaching. His work evolves through commissions, collaborations with foundries, and self-initiated projects. He is a member of the Mayan Encoding Project’s multidisciplinary team, affiliated with the Script Encoding Initiative, UC Berkeley. The project aims to define, shape, and facilitate the encoding of the Classic Maya writing system within the Unicode standard.

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.

Jan Kučera completed his Ph.D in Human-Computer Interaction at the Newcastle University and joined Unicode in 2014. He is also member of ISO/JTC 1/SC 2 and ISO/TC 46 committees. Jan provides input on South Asian script proposals.

Biswajit Mandal currently works in the Education department of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands administration. He has been working with Unicode since 2020. In 2025, he was an awardee of World Endangered Writing Day for his script research. He is a content contributor for Omniglot and ScriptSource and works most on endangered, tribal, and lost scripts of South Asia.

Febri Muhammad Nasrullah is a student of Cartography and Remote Sensing at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. Originally from Indonesia, he conducts research on indigenous Indonesian scripts. He has been an active contributor to the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) since 2024 and to the Unicode Consortium since 2022. His work centers on the documentation and encoding of scripts such as Lampung, Kerinci, Kawi, Sundanese, and those of the Nusa Tenggara region. In addition to script research, Febri is involved in type design and font engineering. He specializes in complex scripts—including Balinese, Javanese, and Sundanese—developing OpenType features to support their unique typographic behaviors. His broader aim is to support the digital preservation and accessibility of traditional writing systems in Indonesia.

Carlos Pallán Gayol is an archaeologist, IT and digital humanities expert specializing in Maya and Mesoamerican archaeology, epigraphy, hieroglyphic decipherment, and script-encoding. He earned a doctorate (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Bonn and a Master’s from Mexico’s National University (UNAM). Since 2006, he has applied innovative digital technologies—machine learning, 3D scanning, photogrammetry, RTI—to cultural heritage documentation. Currently a Research Associate at Bonn’s Center for Digital Humanities, he collaborates with Unicode and UC Berkeley. At Mexico’s INAH, he directed the Ajimaya glyph documentation project, contributing to archaeological investigations at significant sites in Mexico and Guatemala.

Charles L. “Chuck” Riley was born and raised in Iowa, and attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He spent a semester and a summer abroad during his undergraduate years in Senegal, and returned there for Peace Corps service in the mid-1990s. He learned African languages including Wolof, Mandinka, and Jakhanke while in Senegal, and continued study as an anthropology student at SUNY Buffalo and as a student of African Studies at Yale University, where he now works as a catalog librarian. He first got involved with the Script Encoding Initiative in 2004 after attending a Unicode Technical Committee meeting outside of Toronto, Ontario. Together with Michael Everson and others, he co-authored successful encoding proposals for the scripts of Vai, Bamum, Bassa Vah, and Garay.

Michel Suignard 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. He served as Secretary for the Unicode Consortium from 2007 to 2020 and 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.

Gabrielle Vail earned her PhD in Anthropology from Tulane University and is a Research Collaborator at the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the archaeology and epigraphy of prehispanic Maya cultures, as documented in hieroglyphic sources such as the Maya codices.

Oreen Yousuf is a PhD student in Natural Language Processing at Uppsala University. He has an industrial and academic background in engineering and machine learning, with personal interests involving linguistics and of course writing systems. His PhD is on Handwritten Text Recognition of Ajami manuscripts, which involves a mix of computer vision, natural language processing, linguistics, and writing systems. Outside of his PhD, Oreen researches (mainly) African scripts from various countries for Unicode. His involvement with Unicode has led to meeting many people that use unique scripts and dozens of creative people that work in typography, keyboard design, and field-linguistics.