Mission-Driven Leadership

Saerin Cho

Term: 2021 – 2026

Audit and Risk Committee
Compensation Committee
Finance and Investment Committee

Saerin Cho is an attorney with comprehensive experience in advising, researching, and representing mission-driven organizations and civil society worldwide. Saerin is currently the Chief Legal Officer at Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Previously, Saerin was the General Counsel of Digital Green Foundation, a global development organization that provides technology solutions for farmers to build prosperous communities.

Prior to Digital Green, Saerin was the Chief Eligibility Counsel and Deputy General Counsel at TechSoup, a global social enterprise that connects technology resources with nonprofit organizations in 236 jurisdictions. Saerin is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Ms. Cho was re-appointed to serve a three-year term as of July 1, 2023.

Keith Davidson

Term: 2019 – 2025

Audit and Risk Committee
Finance and Investment Committee

Keith Davidson has held a number of senior management and board positions in the not-for-profit and commercial sectors. Keith’s expertise crosses a variety of disciplines including newspaper, radio and, more recently, the Internet. He has held various roles including Executive Director and member of the Governing Council of InternetNZ, which manages the .nz top level domain.
Keith has been active in ICANN since its inception and was vice chair of the country code Names Supporting Organisation for 6 years. He also chaired and co-chaired a number of ICANN working groups.

In ISOC, Keith served as a trustee from 2012 to 2015, and chaired their Nominations Committee. Keith currently runs a small consultancy that provides advice to ccTLDs, and is enjoying a less hectic lifestyle in semi-retirement in New Zealand. He asserts that responsible organisations like PIR have a duty of strong leadership and best practice governance as an exemplar model TLD. Mr. Davidson was re-appointed to serve a three-year term as of July 1, 2022.

Eric Burger

Term: 2021 – 2027

Finance and Investment Committee, Chair
Compensation Committee

Eric Burger is Research Director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative and Reserch Professor at Virginia Tech. His research and teaching covers cybersecurity, distributed computing, DLT, systems economics and risk, policy, and network governance. He returns to the PIR Board after serving on detail as Assistant Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and prior to that as the Chief Technology Officer of the Federal Communications Commission. Prior to Virginia Tech, he was a Professor at Georgetown University. Before academia, he was CTO of several network equipment and enterprise software companies. He currently serves on a number of advisory boards. He is also a member of the Industry Advisory Council of Medgar Evers College CUNY, designated a predominantly black institution / minority-serving institution (PBI/MSI) and Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Computing Advisory Board.

Dr. Burger has published over 20 IETF, 3GPP, and W3C standards and holds over 20 issued U.S. patents. He is a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors. He has a SBEE, MBA, and CS PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mr. Burger was re-appointed to serve a three-year term as of July 1, 2024.

Michael Silber

Term: 2022 – 2025

Audit and Risk Committee, Chair
Compensation Committee
NetBeacon Institute Advisory Council Liaison

Michael (Mike) Silber is an attorney and Group Executive Regulatory Affairs at MTN, Africa’s largest mobile network operator that provides voice, data, fintech, digital, enterprise, wholesale and API services to 295 million customers in 19 markets. Mike previously served on the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and has served numerous Internet naming and numbering organizations as well as industry associations and academic and resource networks.

Lena Beck Rørvig

Term: 2022 – 2025

Compensation Committee, Chair
Finance and Investment Committee

Lena Beck Rørvig is an entrepreneur and executive coach unlocking global leaders’ potential. Ms Rørvig lives and works internationally and has a diverse background as a stockbroker, Global HR executive, entrepreneur, and angel investor. Lena’s board experience includes a range of non-profit and for-profit boards. She holds an M.Sc. (economics) for Copenhagen Business School and executive education from INSEAD and Henley Business School.

Kathryn Kleiman

Term: 2023 – 2026

Audit and Risk Committee
PIR Advisory Council Liaison

Kathryn Kleiman is a professor at the American University Washington College of Law. She previously worked at law firms where she specialized in Internet law and policy and has won various awards for her work with women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).

George Sadowsky

Term: 2024 – 2027

Audit and Risk Committee
Finance and Investment Committee

George Sadowsky received an A.B. degree in mathematics from Harvard, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Yale.  He has worked as an applied mathematician and a programmer, and has directed computing centers and networks at Yale University, the Brookings Institution, Northwestern University and New York University.  

At the United Nations during 1973-1986, he supported numerous technical assistance projects in ICT including the Chinese Population Census of 1982, and has worked in more than 50 developing countries.  During 2001-2006 he was Executive Director of the Global Internet Policy Initiative with Internet policy projects in 17 countries in transition. He has been a consultant to foundations, governments and international agencies. 

He was a Director of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) during 2009-2018.  Previously he served on Boards of AppliedTheory Corporation, the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking, the New York State Educational and Research Network and the Internet Society.  From 2005-2009 he was a Special Adviser to the chair of the Internet Governance Forum.

In 2013 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, and in 2022 he received ISOC’s Jon Postel award for meritorious service for the Internet.  He has written and lectured extensively on ICT and development (see georgesadowsky.org/ for more information).

Jon Nevett

Jonathon Nevett is the President and CEO of Public Interest Registry (PIR). Jon is a veteran of the domain name industry, co-founding Donuts Inc. in 2010 and helping to raise in excess of $150M to form a registry of over 240 Internet domain extensions. Before PIR and Donuts, he served as Senior Vice President at Network Solutions, where he was responsible for policy, government affairs, registry relations, and the corporate ethics office.

Jon also co-founded the Domain Name Association, an industry trade association, and has participated as a leader at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in various capacities. He has served on many boards, including Chair of the board of NameJet and Central Registry Solutions, two joint ventures in the domain name industry, and Vice-Chair of the board of the Green Acres School. During the Obama Administration, he was appointed to the Online Safety and Technology Working Group to help protect children on the Internet.

Jon earned a BA in Political Science from Binghamton University and a JD from Harvard Law School. Jon serves as a non-voting member of the PIR Board.

Sally Wentworth

Sally Wentworth is the incoming CEO of the Internet Society, starting 1 September 2024. She currently serves as the Internet Society’s Managing Director, where she is responsible for positioning the organization as a recognized advocate for building and defending the Internet and ensuring that the Internet Society has a strong and effective voice for its mission.

Sally joined the Internet Society in 2009 and focused on her passion for building bridges between Internet technical experts and policymakers. She came to the Internet Society from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she served as Assistant Director for Telecommunications and Information Policy from 2007-2009 building multi-agency consensus around complex technical and regulatory Internet policies and spearheaded policies related to Internet governance, cybersecurity, telecommunications policy, intellectual property and patent reform, privacy, and other information technology policies.

From 1999-2007, Sally served as the Economic Bureau Foreign Affairs Officer at the U.S. Department of State where she advised and represented the U.S. on a wide range of foreign policy and technology issues in dozens of international negotiations, including for the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Sally joined the State Department in 1999 as a Presidential Management Fellow.

Sally holds an M.A. in International Political Economy from the Claremont Graduate University (Claremont, California) and a B.A. in Political Science from Westmont College (Santa Barbara, California). She is based in Dayton, Ohio (United States).