NISO - Key Persons


Alison Mudditt - CEO

Job Titles:
  • CEO
  • Director
  • Member of the Finance Committee
  • PLOS As Chief Executive Officer
Alison Mudditt joined PLOS as Chief Executive Officer in June, 2017, where her primary role is to ensure PLOS's continuous innovation, bold leadership, and mission-driven differentiation in scientific communication. Prior to PLOS, Alison served as Director of the University of California Press for six years where she ushered in new strategies to lead the Press into the digital age and as Executive Vice President at SAGE Publications, leading publishing programs across books, journals and digital platforms. Her 30 years in the publishing industry also include leadership positions at Blackwell Publishers in Oxford, UK, and Taylor & Francis Inc., in Philadelphia. Alison is a frequent speaker at industry meetings and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Center for Open Science and the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and on the Advisory Board for the Authors' Alliance. In the past, Alison has also served on the Board of ALPSP, as Vice Chair of the Scientific Publications Committee and a member of the Open Science Committee for the American Heart Association; on the Executive Council of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the American Association of Publishers; and as Co-Chair of the Dean's Leadership Council at California State University, Channel Islands.

Andrew Pace

Job Titles:
  • Director
  • Executive Director

Angela Ecklund

Job Titles:
  • Director
  • Member of the Audit Committee
  • Head of Thesaurus Team and Tutorial and Instructional Technology Producer

Anita Kazmierczak-Hoffman

Job Titles:
  • Head, Bibliographic Control Section
  • Head, Bibliographic Control Section / National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled
  • Member of Committee

Betsy Fanning

Job Titles:
  • Consultant
  • Consultant to
Betsy Fanning is a consultant to NISO leading its ISO standards program efforts. In this capacity, she is assisting with the administration of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group to ISO TC 46 and ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC34 and assisting in the role of ANSI committee manager for ISO TC46 Subcommittee 9. Additionally, she supports the PDF Association, Inc. with their standards program. Prior to becoming a consultant, Betsy was Director of Standards for the 3D PDF Consortium and AIIM.

Bill Kasdorf

Job Titles:
  • Principal
  • Member of Committee
  • Principal / Kasdorf and Associates, LLC
, is Principal of Kasdorf & Associates, LLC, a publishing consultancy focusing on accessibility, XML/HTML/EPUB modeling, information infrastructure, standards and best practices alignment, and editorial and production workflows. He is a founding partner of Publishing Technology Partners. Bill is active in the W3C (serving on the Publishing Working Group, Publishing Business Group, and the EPUB 3 and Knowledge Domains Community Groups) and is a member of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), and WIPO's Accessible Books Consortium (ABC). Past President of SSP, he is the recipient of the SSP Distinguished Service Award, the BISG Industry Champion Award, and the IDEAlliance/DEER Luminaire Award. Bill has written and spoken widely on publishing technology and workflows. He is general editor of The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing and co-editor of the BISG Guide to Accessible Publishing. In his consulting practice, he has served large international publishers such as Pearson, Cengage, Wolters Kluwer, Kaplan, and Sage; scholarly presses and societies such as Harvard, MIT, Toronto, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge, and IEEE; aggregators such as VitalSource; and global publishing and library organizations such as the World Bank, the British Library, the Asian Development Bank, OCLC, and the European Union.

Charles LaPierre

Job Titles:
  • Member of Committee
  • Principal Accessibility and Content Quality Architect
  • Principal Accessibility and Content Quality Architect / Benetech
  • Technical Lead
Charles LaPierre, Technical Lead, DIAGRAM and Born Accessible, Benetech has over 20 years' development experience, and has been a pioneer in accessible product development since 1993. Charles has a Bachelors and Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa Canada. He currently co-chairs the accessibility task force for the W3C's Digital Publishing Interest Group, and was one of the editors of the IDPF's "Accessibility 1.0 Specification - Conformance and Discovery Requirements for EPUB Publications." Charles also was a contributor to the BISG's "Quick Start Guide to Accessible Digital Publishing.

Chris Oliver

Job Titles:
  • Head, Resource Description and Metadata Services
  • Head, Resource Description and Metadata Services / University of Ottawa
  • Member of Committee

Damita Snow

Job Titles:
  • Director, Accessibility & Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategy, Publications and Standards
  • Member of Committee

Darrin Evans

Job Titles:
  • Director, Virtual Learning Community
  • Director, Virtual Learning Community / Wake Technical Community College
  • Member of Committee

Dawn Evans

Job Titles:
  • AccessText Network Coordinator
  • Member of Committee

Elaine Ober

Job Titles:
  • Director of Accessibility Consulting Programs
  • Member of Committee

Evan Yamanishi

Job Titles:
  • Member of Committee
  • Vice President, Director of Engineering & Accessibility

George Kerscher

Job Titles:
  • Chief Innovations Officer of the DAISY Consortium
  • Chief Innovations Officer, DAISY Consortium
  • Chief Innovations Officer, DAISY Consortium / Senior Officer, Global Literacy, Benetech
  • Member of Committee
George Kerscher is Chief Innovations Officer of the DAISY Consortium, an international organization dedicated to facilitating access to information for persons with disabilities. He is President of the International Digital Publishing Forum, Senior Advisor, Global Literacy at Benetech, and chair of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Steering Council. He was named an Innovator of the Year by U.S. News and World Report in 1998, received the Harry Murphy Catalyst Award in 2004, was recognized as a White House Champion of Change in 2012, and was given the Industry Champion award by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) in 2016. Mr. Kerscher received a B.A. from Northeastern Illinois University.

J. Stephen Downie

Job Titles:
  • Associate
  • Member of Committee
  • Professor and Associate Dean for Research, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
  • Professor and Associate Dean for Research, Graduate School of Library and Information Science / University of Illinois
J. Stephen Downie is the Associate Dean for Research and a Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Downie is the Illinois Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center. He is also Director of the International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL) and founder and ongoing director of the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX). Professor Downie holds a BA (Music Theory and Composition) along with a Master's and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science, all earned at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

Jacob Jett

Job Titles:
  • Member of Committee
  • Research Librarian
  • Research Librarian / Association of State Floodplain Managers

James Yanchak

Job Titles:
  • Member of Committee
  • Production Technologies Manager

Jamie Axelrod

Job Titles:
  • Director, Disability Resources / Northern Arizona University
  • Member of Committee

Jason Griffey

Job Titles:
  • Director of Strategic Initiatives
Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards exp ...

Jonathan Clark

Job Titles:
  • Director
  • Member of the Audit Committee
  • Principal, Independent Consultant and Managing Agent

Judith Fraenkel

Job Titles:
  • Member of Committee

Karim Boughida

Job Titles:
  • Chairman of the Executive Committee
  • Member of the Finance Committee
  • Dean of University Libraries

Keondra Bailey

Job Titles:
  • Assistant Standards Program Manager
  • Member of Committee
Keondra is the Assistant Standards Program Manager at NISO. Prior to joining NISO, she worked at Duke University Press as the Digital Access Specialist. ...

Kimberly Gladfelter Graham

Job Titles:
  • Education Program Manager & DEIA Advocate
  • Member of Committee
Kimberly Gladfelter Graham's role at NISO has evolved since joining the organization in 2018. In her role as Office Manager, she handled administration priorities and supported the Executive Direc ...

Korey Singleton

Job Titles:
  • Deputy ADA Coordinator for Accessibility and ATI Manager / George Mason University
  • Member of Committee

Lisa Jackson

Job Titles:
  • Office Manager
Lisa joins NISO from the Washington, DC office of Consumer Reports, where she had been Office Manager and Advocacy Team Operations Lead since 2018. ...

Maria Stanton

Job Titles:
  • Member of the Executive Committee
  • Atla ( USA ) - Founder and Honorary Member
  • Director of Production

Mary Beth Barilla

Job Titles:
  • Business Development
  • Director of Business Development and Communications
  • Member of Committee
Mary Beth Barilla is NISO's Director of Business Development and Communications, where she manages member communications and ensures our sustainability through growth in membership, sponsorship, ev ...

Mary Sauer-Games

Job Titles:
  • Director
  • Vice President / Product Management

Mat Harris

Job Titles:
  • Member of Committee
  • Web Accessibility Specialist

Nettie Lagace

Job Titles:
  • Associate Executive Director
  • Member of Committee
Nettie Lagace is the Associate Executive Director at NISO, where she is responsible for facilitating the work of NISO's topic committees and development groups for standards and best practices, and ...

Patricia Ginnis

Job Titles:
  • Director
  • Member of the Governance Committee
  • Vice President, Product Management

Ravit David

Job Titles:
  • Distinctive Collections Librarian, Scholars Portal / University of Toronto
  • Member of Committee

Rebecca McLeod

Job Titles:
  • Director
  • Member of the Nominating Committee
  • Managing Director, Harvard Data Science Review

Rhonda Ross

Job Titles:
  • Chairman of the Audit Committee
  • Director
  • Director, Global Marketing

Richard Urban

Job Titles:
  • Member of Committee
  • Senior Program & Engagement Officer, OCLC Research

Robert Wheeler

Job Titles:
  • Member of the Executive Committee
  • Member of the Finance Committee
  • Member of the Governance Committee
  • Director, Publishing Technologies

Ruth Haber

Job Titles:
  • Member of Committee

Ryan Bernier

Job Titles:
  • Chairman of the Nominating Committee
  • Director
  • Vice President, Database Partnerships

Salwa Ismail

Job Titles:
  • Director
  • Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Information Technology

Sara Groveman

Job Titles:
  • Communications and Event Coordinator
  • Communications and Events Coordinator
Sara Groveman is the Communications and Event Coordinator at NISO. Her role involves providing support to educational events and monthly publications, developing creative web content, ...

Todd Carpenter

Job Titles:
  • Executive Director
  • Member of the Executive Committee
  • Member of the Finance Committee
  • Member of Committee
Todd Carpenter joined NISO as Executive Director in September 2006. ...

Trevor A. Dawes

Job Titles:
  • Director
  • Member of the Nominating Committee
  • Member of Committee
  • Vice Provost for Libraries and Museums and May Morris University Librarian

W.W. Norton

Job Titles:
  • Member of Committee

Wayne Strickland

Job Titles:
  • Chairman of the Finance Committee
  • Director
  • Member of the Executive Committee

Will Awad

Job Titles:
  • Director of Digital Accessibility
  • Member of Committee

Yali Feng

Job Titles:
  • Member of Committee