Meet our team!  

   (in alphabetical order)

Deborah (Debbie) Anderson University of California, Berkeley
(Department of Linguistics) Advisor (Unicode proposal component)


Debbie Anderson runs the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) project at UC Berkeley, which assists users in getting eligible characters and scripts into Unicode. SEI began in 2002 and has helped get over 70 scripts into Unicode. She is also a Unicode Technical Director and a U.S. representative to the ISO subcommittee on coded character sets. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies (Linguistics emphasis).

Andrew Glass Microsoft
  Mayan Font development

Andrew Glass is a program 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, Department of Asian Languages and Literature. He is the author of “Four Gāndhārī Saṃyuktāgama Sūtras”, a book published by the University of Washington Press as well as numerous academic articles. He has contributed many proposals to Unicode to define and improve support for different complex scripts. These include Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts, Egyptian Hieroglyph Format Controls, as well as refinements to ADLaM, Chakma, Mongolian and others. Prior to joining Microsoft, he taught at the University of Washington, University of Leiden, and Bukkyō University in Japan.

Christine Hernandez The Latin American Library, Tulane University
  Collaborator

Christine Hernández serves as Curator of Special Collections of The Latin American Library, Tulane University. She specializes in Mesoamerican archaeology with practical experience in the Greater Southwest and Southeast Louisiana. She has published widely on the archaeology of Mesoamerica, specializing in the prehistory of Michoacán and the El Bajío of north-central Mexico, and painted Maya and central Mexican codices. Her published works include journal articles and chapters in edited volumes by publishers like Dumbarton Oaks, University of Florida Press, Ancient Mesoamerica, Ancient America, MARI, and BAR. She has co-authored several volumes with Dr. Gabrielle Vail, the most recent of which is Re-Creating Primordial Time: Foundation Rituals and Mythology in the Postclassic Maya Codices (2013), published by University Press of Colorado.

Holly Maxwell University at Albany- SUNY
(Department of Anthropology) Research Assistant

Holly Maxwell is an archaeologist, linguist, and researcher working towards her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Albany. As a graduate assistant she taught the lab portion of the Introduction to Linguistics undergraduate course for four years. She holds degrees in both Anthropology and Humanities, and has a background in Information Technology. Her passion is the intersection of art and archaeology among the pre-contact Maya, studying the culture through their hieroglyphic writing system and iconography. Previously based in Florida, she has been involved in archaeological excavations, museum education and public outreach, and is affiliated with the Florida Institute for Hieroglyphic Research.

Carlos Pallán Gayol University of Bonn (Dept. of Ancient American Archaeology and Ethnology) Project research / coordination


Carlos Pallán Gayol is an archaeologist and epigrapher specializing in ancient Mayan and Mesoamerican cultures, hieroglyphic decipherment, as well as a Digital Humanities professional, active on applying new technologies for documenting and researching ancient cultural heritage. Currently a Doctoral Candidate by the University of Bonn in Germany, he holds an archaeology degree from the National Anthropology School in Mexico and a Masters in Mesoamerican Studies from Mexico’s National University (UNAM). He has been part of several archaeological projects in Mexico and Guatemala, working at sites such as Tikal, Uaxactún, Toniná, Pomoná and Yaxchilán, and between 2006-2011 was appointed Director of Ajimaya glyph documentation project by Mexico’s Cultural Heritage Institute (INAH). He has published chapters in edited volumes from Archaeopress and Acta Mesoamericana and contributions in Arqueología Mexicana. His books include Breve Historia de los Mayas (Nowtilus, Madrid) and recently co-edited with Antje Gunsenheimer and Enrique N. Cruz the volume El otro héroe: estudios sobre la producción social de memoria al margen del discurso oficial en América Latina (V&R unipress and Bonn University Press)

Nick Sahler Independent, Natives in Tech Project Contributor - Data Infrastructure and Machine Learning


Nick Sahler is a Machine Learning engineer at Squarespace by day. Outside of work, he contributes to the non-profit Natives in Tech working on varous indigenous language preservation projects.

Céline Tamignaux University of Bonn (Dept. of Ancient American Archaeology and Ethnology) Research Assistant

Céline Tamignaux is an archaeologist, art historian and epigrapher specializing in prehispanic archaeology with special interest in ancient Mayan iconography and hieroglyphic decipherment. She holds a Master degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Pre-Columbian art history and archaeology. Between 2010 and 2015, she has been conducting research on mayan iconography thanks to a grant from the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). She has been part of the Uxul Archaeological Project (Mexico) and, between 2016 and 2019, has been research assistant for the project Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan from the University of Bonn.

Gabrielle Vail University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Dept. of Anthropology & Research Labs of Archaeology) Project research / coordination


Gabrielle Vail (Ph.D., Tulane University) holds a research position at UNC-Chapel Hill and is affiliated with UNC’s program InHerit: Indigenous Heritage Passed to Present. Vail’s research focuses on the archaeology and epigraphy of Postclassic Maya cultures, as documented in the screenfold Maya codices (see her website mayacodices.org). She has received five NEH grants and fellowships, including a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for the on-going Classic Maya Text Repository Project. Her books include, among others, Indigenous Conceptions of the Sky in Mesoamerica and the Andes (forthcoming); Códice de Madrid; Re-Creating Primordial Time: Foundation Rituals and Mythology in the Postclassic Maya Codices (with Christine Hernández); The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs, Volume 2: The Codical Texts (with Martha Macri) , and The Madrid Codex: New Approaches to Understanding an Ancient Maya Manuscript (co-edited with Anthony Aveni).

Stephen White Ca' Foscari University of Venice

  Digital Humanities Software Developer (READ)



Stephen White is Contract Professor with the Dipartimento di Management at the Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia. Also running his own consultancy since 2013, as System Architect and Lead Programmer on READ (Research Environment for Ancient Documents) a platform for philology. Between 2006 and 2013 where he worked at the University of Sydney on a knowledge/data modeling system for Digital Humanities projects such as Dictionary of Sydney, Digital Harlem, Bali Paintings Virtual Museum, and archeological field data collection. He spent 7 of 11 years at Microsoft teaching Object Oriented programming to developers and 4 years in Microsoft research defining and developing educational technologies. During his role as initial chair of the IEEE workgroup on 'Learning Objects' he defined the notion of learning object and helped set the current standards for educational CMS systems. His current areas of interest lie in data/knowledge modeling and machine learning applied to digital humanities. He has over 35 years of programming experience.


The NcodeX Project is a collaboration between the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Bonn, Germany, the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI), the Unicode Consortium, the Latin American Library at Tulane University, the Florida Institute for Hieroglyphic Research, and other partner institutions.
This project was made possible by a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (HAA-268887-20) from the National Endowment for the Humanities; two Adopt-a-Character grants from the Unicode Consortium (AAC-Mayan-2019 and -21), and a Dan C. Hazen Fellowship from SALALM (Seminar for the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials).

SEI work on Maya hieroglyphs has received support from NEH grant PR‐253360‐17 and PR-268710-20, as well as a Google Research grant. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Unicode Consortium, or SALALM.



Special thanks to Matthews Rechs and Christopher Chapman
at Adobe Inc. for supporting our Project with complimentary
Creative Cloud licenses that enhance several aspects of our worklows