John Simpson joined the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary in the summer of 1976. He was appointed Chief Editor in 1993. He is a member of the English Faculty at Oxford and of the Philological Society (where the idea of the Dictionary was first mooted in the 1850s), and a Fellow of Kellogg College. He is a world expert on proverbs and slang, and has edited dictionaries on both these subjects for Oxford University Press; he regularly lectures and broadcasts on the English language and on the Dictionary.
--from the author's website