WG Chair Biographies

Rob Evans is chief network architect in the infrastructure division of Jisc, where he works on Janet, the UK's Research and Education Network. He has a diverse network engineering background with experience in a number of institutions. From 2014-2016, he served as a member of TERENA Technical Committee and also served as a member of UKNOF Programme Committee from 2005-2012. He was also a member of the programme committee for The Networking Conference, the flagship event at Géant.

From 2006 to 2016, Rob was the RIPE NCC Routing Working Group co-chair. As of 2019, he now serves as co-Chair of the RIPE NCC Services Working Group.

Bijal Sanghani is Secretary General at Euro-IX based in London, UK. Her past experience includes DNS management for DEMON Internet, Provisioning Engineer at Level 3 and Senior Operations Engineer at FLAG Telecom and Reliance Globalcom, where she was involved from the beginning to build the FLAG IP network.

In 2011, Bijal moved from an operational role to the top management role at Euro-IX, a non-profit membership association for IXPs. In her role, she brings the members together to share ideas and experiences on technical, commercial and regulatory matters, and works on other IXP related projects such as the IXPDB and support programsto help IXPs in need. Bijal has grown the membership by over 90% since she started in 2011.

Bijal has been involved with the Peering and Interconnect Community since 2003, she’s been a RIPE NCC Services Working Group Co-chair since 2005 and served on the UKNOF Program Committee from 2006 until 2014. Bijal was elected on to the PeeringDB Board in 2017 where she currently serves as a Director.

János Zsakó is currently the IT and business adviser at ISZT Nonprofit Kft., the Hungarian ccTLD Registry (.hu). He was the Managing Director from 2014 to 2021, and the Development Director between 2011 and 2014 at the same company. He contributed to DNSSEC deployment and towards establishing a reliable environment for authoritative secondaries for .hu. As the Technology Director of 3C Kft, from 2005 to 2011, he acquired a vast experience in satellite communications, network security, Internet-related services like DNS, mail and routing. 3C offered Internet access services over ADSL countrywide and over microwave in the Budapest area in Hungary.

János has regularly attended RIPE Meetings since RIPE 21, Rome. He was a member of the editorial committee of the RIPE address policy document ripe-136. As a member of the Database Security Task Force, he summarized the results in RFC2726. Later, he was a member of the RIPE Data Protection Task Force, and a member of the ad hoc group for DNS WG 67.1. He gave a presentation on IPv6 penetration in Hungary at RIPE 68. In 2017, János acted as the host for RIPE 74 in Budapest.

As a member of the RIPE NCC Executive Board, János served as the Treasurer between 2001 and 2010. He contributed to the safeguarding of the assets of the RIPE NCC during the financial crisis and provided transparency regarding the financial situation. He acted as an adviser to the RIPE NCC Executive Board between 2010 and 2015, and he was a member of the Executive Board once again between 2015 and 2018.

János played an active role in the formation of the Council of Hungarian Internet Providers (CHIP). He assumed several roles in CHIP over the years: Chairman of the Registration Committee (1998); Vice-President (1999); Chairman of the Network Security Committee (2001-2016); member of the Board (2015); member of the Supervisory Board (2005-2013, 2016); member of the Supervisory Board of the .hu ccTLD Registry from 2000 to 2011. János is a member of honour of CHIP since 2013.