Dr. Didier Verna has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is currently working as an assistant professor for EPITA, a private Computer Science university located in Paris. He gives lectures on Operating Systems, Computer Graphics, Functional Programming and Typesetting. His main research topic is on the use of Lisp, a multi-paradigm dynamic language, to reconcile genericity and performance.

Didier Verna is also quite involved in free software: he has been one of the core maintainers of XEmacs for more than 15 years. He is also a committer to Gnus and BBDB, the author of several LaTeX packages and an occasional contributor to other Free Software projects (the GNU Autotools most notably; he was one of the technical reviewers for the “Goat Book”).

Didier Verna is a member of the European Lisp Symposium steering committee and serves as a program committee member in various conferences (International Lisp Conference, European Lisp Symposium, Dynamic Languages Symposium, Context-Oriented Programming workshop, ACM Symposium on Applied Computing).

All of this is in fact half-true: two days a week, Didier Verna drops his scientific hat and wears the Jazz musician one instead. But that is another story…