Jack Halpern is an entrepreneur

Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

 and linguist specializing in Chinese character

Chinese character

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

s or Kanji

Kanji

Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...

. He is best known as Editor in Chief for the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary

Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary

The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary is a kanji dictionary based on the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary by Jack Halpern and published by Kenkyūsha...

 and the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary.

Halpern is CEO of the CJK Dictionary Institute, offering electronic resources for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionary data. Halpern is also a Fellow at Showa Women's University

Showa Women's University

is a women's private university in Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan. It also contains a school with all levels from kindergarten to high school.- History :Japan Women's School of Higher Education , the predecessor of this university, was established by poet Enkichi Hitomi , who gathered together his...

.

Halpern also is the founder and current Executive Director for International Development of the International Unicycling Federation. Halpern is a major contributor to the Lifeboat Foundation, a project which aims to build a space colony so that humanity can survive in the event of the Earth's destruction.