David Mertz is a director of the PSF,and chair of its Trademarks Committee and Outreach & Education Committee. He wrote the columns Charming Python and XML Matters for IBM developerWorks and the Addison-Wesley book Text Processing in Python, has spoken at multiple OSCONs and PyCons, and was invited to be a keynote speaker at PyCon India, PyCon UK, PyCon ZA, and PyCon Belarus.

In the distant past, David spent some time as a university professor, teaching in areas far removed from computer programming, but gained some familiarity with the vicissitudes of pedagogy.

Since 2008, David has worked with folks who have built the world's fastest supercomputer for performing molecular dynamics. He is pleased to find Python becoming the default high-level language for most scientific computing projects.