The Board of Directors of the Conservancy elects its officers. The current officers are:
Bradley M. Kuhn began his work in the Free Software Movement as a volunteer when, in 1992, he became an early adopter of the popular GNU/Linux operating system, and began contributing to various Free Software projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software development consultant for Westinghouse, Lucent Technologies, and numerous small companies. He also spent one year teaching Advanced Placement Computer Science (using GNU/Linux and GCC) at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. In January 2000, he was hired by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and he served as its Executive Director from March 2001 until March 2005, when he left FSF to join the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), where he worked as SFLC's Policy Analyst and Technology Director from 2005 until October 2010, when he joined Conservancy as its Executive Director. Kuhn passed the torch as Conservancy's Executive Director to Karen Sandler in March 2014, and continues on staff at Conservancy as its Distinguished Technologist. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola College in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. His Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free Software languages.
Mark Galassi has been involved in the GNU project since 1984. He currently works as a researcher in the International, Space, and Response division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he has worked on the HETE-2 satellite, ISIS/Genie, the Raptor telescope, the Swift satellite, and the muon tomography project. In 1997, Mark took a couple of years off from Los Alamos (where he was previously in the ISR division and the Theoretical Astrophysics group) to work for Cygnus (now a part of Red Hat) writing software and books for eCos, although he continued working on the HETE-2 satellite (an astrophysical Gamma Ray Burst mission) part time. Mark earned his BA in Physics at Reed College and a PhD from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook.
Peter Brown has worked in non-profit management and finance for more than twenty years. He served as the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation from 2005 until 2011, and previously as its Financial Controller and GPL Compliance Lab Manager. Peter has also been a Director of New Internationalist Publications Cooperative, and worked in London for BBC Network Radio.
Karen M. Sandler is Executive Director of Conservancy. She was previously the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. In partnership with the GNOME Foundation, Karen co-organizes the award winning Outreach Program for Women. Prior to taking up this position, Karen was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). She continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC, the GNOME Foundation and QuestionCopyright.Org. Before joining SFLC, Karen worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. She is a recipient of an O'Reilly Open Source Award and also co-host of the “Free as in Freedom” podcast.
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