A member of Mozilla Europe’s board of directors, Axel Hecht started contributing to Mozilla in 1999, working on XSLT. He has been the module owner of RDF since 2004, steering the development of this backend component towards standards compliance, performance and applicability to web applications. His focus is in developing Mozilla as a platform for web applications as well as lightweight, cross-platform and localizable applications on the client. Axel also started the European annual developer meetings in 2000 and has been a central figure in the European developer community ever since. Recently, he participated in bringing localizations of Firefox into the primary source repository, integrating platform and application development communities with the localization communities around the world.

Axel received a degree in physics from the University of Stuttgart and a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Kiel. He is now with the Department of Applied Mathematics at Humboldt University in Berlin.