Dr. Didier Verna has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is currently working as an assistant professor for the Research and Development Laboratory of EPITA, a private computer science university located in Paris. He gives lectures on Operating Systems, Computer Graphics, Functional Programming and Typesetting. His research interests include Genericity, Performance, Object Orientation and Functional Programming, all in one language: Common Lisp.
Didier Verna is also quite involved in free software: he has been one of the core maintainers of XEmacs for 10 years. He is also the author of several LaTeX packages (FiNK, FiXme, QCM and CurVe) 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 currently organizes the European Lisp Workshop co-located every year with ECOOP, and is a member of the European Lisp Symposium steering committee.
All of this is actually only true 3 days a week. The rest of the time, Didier Verna is a semi-professional Jazz musician.
Didier Verna, like many people, is a person... Didier Verna maintains Clon, Declt, CL-RCFiles and asdf-flv