Roozbeh Pournader

Roozbeh Pournader is a free software activist and expert on Unicode text encoding, text rendering, and fonts, especially for bidirectional text. He is originally from Iran, and is now living in the United States. After the establishment of the Persian Wikipedia, he became the first administrator of the project. He was a major assistant, participant and co-founder of the Persian Wikipedia.

He was a technical manager at Sharif Linux Project at Sharif University of Technology, and formerly served as a technical manager at FarsiTeX.

Education
Pournader was born in Tehran, Iran, where he obtained his high school diploma in 1996 from Allameh Helli High Schools. He graduated from Sharif University of Technology in the field of computer engineering.

Career
Pournader moved to California, where he worked at HighTech Passport, Ltd. In 2011 he was hired by Google, where he worked as an Internationalization Engineer, focusing on text encoding and rendering, fonts, and bidirectional text. He joined the Android Text team in late 2014. , he works as a software engineer for WhatsApp, a Facebook company.

Activities
In 2003, Pournader was appointed to provide a report for the United Nations Development Programme about computer development and computer localization in Afghanistan.

Pournader is a contributing editor of the Unicode Standard, responsible for maintaining Unicode Technical Report #53 (Unicode Arabic Mark Rendering), as well as being one the editors of the core specification. Since January 2020 he has been a Technical Director of the Unicode Consortium.

Honors

 * 1995 – Silver medal of International Olympiad in Informatics
 * 1996 – Gold medal of International Olympiad in Informatics
 * 2009 – bulldog award of Unicode Consortium
 * 2020 – Gold medal as part of the mdi winning team