Foundation Contacts

Veronika Soboleva

ICPC Foundation Director of Development

Veronika is a professional with a solid experience in international public service, cross-cultural communication and project management in such areas as education, public/social infrastructure, and digital city planning. Graduated from Moscow State University (Moscow, Russia), Inalco (France, Paris), EHESS (France, Paris) and Shenzhen Polytechnic University (Shenzhen, China), Veronika is fluent in 5 languages and has been actively involved into several international philanthropic and charity organisations focused on education since 2009. Veronika has joined the ICPC in 2018 and currently leads development and fundraising activities of the organisation.

Foundation Board

Bill Poucher

ICPC Executive Director & ICPC Foundation President

Dr. Poucher is Executive Director of the ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest and has directed the ICPC since 1988. He has served as World Finals Judge, South Central Regional Director, and a co-coach. He serves on the Board of the UPE Honor Society in the Computing Sciences. Dr. Poucher is Professor of Computer Science at Baylor University. He is an ACM Fellow. He is recipient of the University of Warsaw Medal. He developed systems in energy management, communications, synthetic vaccine research, and global enterprise tools. He is a Texan and co-founder of acm.org.


Jeff Donahoo

ICPC Deputy Executive Director & ICPC Foundation Secretary

Jeff Donahoo serves as the Deputy Executive Director of the ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest and Executive Director of World Finals. He directs the information technology infrastructure development for ICPC global operations. In addition, he created and directs ICPCNews. He currently serves as Professor of Computer Science at Baylor University, where he has taught since 1998. He created the Practical Guide series to provide highly-focused books on various computing technologies.


Steve Bourne

ACM President Emeritus and ICPC Director of Ceremonies

Steve Bourne serves as Director of Ceremonies for the ICPC World Finals and has volunteered since 2002 in many roles. He is well-known as the author of the Bourne Shell, which is the foundation for the standard command line interfaces to Unix. Bourne spent nine years at Bell Labs with the Seventh Edition Unix team. As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb debugger and “The UNIX System”, intended for a general readership. Bourne has worked at Silicon Graphics, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems. From 2000 to 2002 he was president of the Association for Computing Machinery. Bourne was chief technology officer at Icon Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, through 2014. He is also the chair of the editorial advisory board for ACM Queue, a magazine he helped found when he was president of the ACM.


John Clevenger

ICPC Technical Director

Dr. John Clevenger has been actively involved in the planning and execution of nearly every ICPC World Finals since 1989. He has been a Coach, Contest Director, Contest Judge, Regional Contest Director, and Steering Committee member for multiple International Regional Contests. He currently serves as ICPC Technical Director. He also oversees the ongoing development of PC2, the most widely used programming contest support system in the world. Dr. Clevenger also has over 40 years of experience teaching a wide variety of computer science topics. He is the developer of several software frameworks and tools for teaching graphics and game architecture, and is co-author of a textbook on computer graphics. He is also a performing jazz musician, and spends summer vacations in his mountain cabin.


James Comer

Director of Regional Contests Emeritus

Dr. James R. Comer currently serves as the Director of Regional Contests Emeritus for the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) and on the Executive Council for UPE. He is the current Chair of the Texas Christian University (TCU) Department of Computer Science, where he has served on the faculty since 1981.


Joe DeBlasi

ICPC Awards Committee

First recipient of and namesake of The ICPC Joseph S. DeBlasi Outstanding Contribution Award. Mr. DeBlasi joined IBM in 1964, where he had worldwide responsibility for IBM product standards and IBM’s relations with national and international standards and technology organizations. He has served on several government delegations. After retiring from IBM, Mr. DeBlasi became Executive Director and CEO of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He retired from the ACM in 1999 and is presently Chairman of Decision Systems Inc., a computing and management consulting firm, and is also a co-managing partner of the IMI-DSI LLC, a New York information technology consulting firm. He also serve on the Board of Directors of a number of non- profit and cultural organizations, including COMAP and ICPC.


Roman Elizarov

NEERC Chief Judge and ICPC Live Director

Roman Elizarov is a professional software developer. He designed and developed high-performance trading software and market data delivery services. He is an expert in Kotlin, Java and JVM, particularly in concurrency, algorithms and performance optimizations for modern architectures. Roman currently works on Kotlin language at JetBrains. In 2000 Roman had graduated from St. Petersburg ITMO. He now teaches a course on concurrent and distributed programming in ITMO. During his undergraduate study he participated at International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Since 1997 and until now Roman serves as a Chief Judge of Northeastern European Regional Programming Contest (NEERC) of ICPC.


Mohamed Fouad

ICPC Director of Logistical Operations and ACPC Director

Eng. Mohamed Fouad serves as the Director of Logistical Operations for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), the Executive Director of the Arab Collegiate Programming Contest (ACPC), and the Arab Regional Director of the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Competition. Under his leadership, the ACPC has grown 2567% in the past five years, with the participation of 45 teams in 2011 increasing to 1200 competing teams in 2016 coming from 13 countries. Mr. Fouad holds the position of Head of Scientific Activities Department in AAST Regional Informatics Center.


CJ Hwang

Asia Super-Regional Contests Director

Dr. C. J. Hwang, PhD, (“CJ”) is the founder and ICPC Director of Asia Contests, which constitute 40% of the participants of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. He is a Professor at Texas State University and author of two books in Chinese literature. CJ has also been active in business and international public service.


Ali Orooji

North America Contests - Director

Dr. Orooji is the Director of North America for the ICPC and a member of its International Steering Committee. Dr. Orooji has been the faculty advisor for the UCF Programming Team since the 1989-1990 academic year. During this time period, the team has never placed below third in the regional competition. Dr. Orooji also organized the UCF High School Programming Tournament. Dr. Orooji served as a member of the Executive Council for the National UPE from 2000-2012. He established the UPE chapter at the University of Central Florida (1991) and has been the faculty advisor for the local chapter.


Jo Perry

ICPC Director of Judging

Jo started working with the ICPC Finals contest in 1986 as a judge. She has served as ICPC Finals Judge, ICPC Finals Chief Judge, and ICPC Director of Judging. She has been a fulltime faculty member in Computer Science at NC State University, worked with several tech startups, and provided IT consulting for two major banks. In addition to consulting, Jo currently teaches one CS course at NCSU.


Marsha Poucher

ICPC Advisor

Marsha H. Poucher served as ICPC Contest Manager since 1998, retiring in 2016. Prior to that time she assisted the Contest Manager and the Executive Director. She is regarded as the Mom of the ICPC. Marsha is a graduate of Auburn University. She taught from 1970-1975.