George Sadowsky recently completed 9-years of service on the ICANN Board of Directors and has recently relocated to the Washington D.C. area.
He received an A.B. degree with honors in Mathematics from Harvard College and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from Yale University. After spending 1958-1962 as an applied mathematician and programmer, his career concentrated on applying computers to economic and social policy, leading academic computing and networking organizations, and making information and communication technologies (ICTs) useful throughout the world. In 1963-64 he introduced the use of microsimulation for tax analysis purposes in the U.S. Treasury Department. During 1966-1970 he founded and directed the Computer Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington; from 1970-73 he did economic research at the Urban Institute leading to his Ph.D. dissertation on the subject of micro-analytic simulation of the household sector.
During 1973-86 at the United Nations, he supported the transfer of information technology to developing countries. He has done work in more than 50 developing countries, including 20 in Africa, and continues to do so. Among other things, he introduced the use of microcomputers for census data processing in Africa in 1979, and he worked in China during 1982-1986 supporting the computing activities of their 1982 Census of Population and Housing.
From 1986 to 2001, he directed academic computing and networking activities, first at Northwestern University and then at New York University. He has been a consultant to the U.S. Treasury Department, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, UNDP, the Swiss Government, and a number of foundations. He was a Board member of AppliedTheory Corporation and was a Trustee of the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN) and the New York State Educational and Research Network (NYSERNet). He was actively involved in World Bank activities during 1996-2002 as a member and Coordinator of the Technical Advisory Panel for the infoDev program, as well as in UNDP and USAID activities. In 1994, he and Larry Landweber formulated USAID's Leland Initiative for providing initial Internet connectivity for 20 African countries. He was a member of the Internet Society Board of Trustees during 1996-1999 and 2000-2004 and served as Vice President for Conferences (1996-1998) and Vice-President for Education (1998-2001). He headed a group of ISOC volunteers who defined and conducted the ISOC Developing Country Network Training Workshops during 1993-2001.
More recently, he was the Executive Director of the Global Internet Policy Initiative (GIPI) from 2001-2006, which had active ongoing Internet policy reform projects in 17 countries. He also served as Senior Technical Adviser within USAID's dot-GOV program for the Internews Consortium, providing ICT policy assistance to the developing world. He has served as an expert witness for litigation in the United Kingdom and the United States. He was a special adviser to Nitin Desai, the Chair of the UN Secretary-General's Internet Governance Forum as well as to the Chair of UN G@ID. He has served as a member of the PIR (Public Internet Registry) Advisory Board, and more recently from 2009-2018 he served as a member of the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Board of Directors.
In 2013 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, and in 2022 he was awarded the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award for outstanding contributions in service to the data communications community. He has written and lectured extensively on ICT and development.
Please refer to his web site, https://georgesadowsky.org/, for additional information.
