Nigel Howard Croft (born 1956 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, UK) is Chairman of the ISO Joint Technical Coordination Group for Management System Standards, having been appointed by ISO's Technical Management Board in December 2020. He was previously Chair of the ISO Technical Committee TC 176/SC 2 from February 2010 until December 2018, with overall responsibility for the ISO 9001 standard, used worldwide as a basis for certification of quality management systems, and the ISO 9004 guidelines standard aimed at improving organisational performance, among others. In 2019 and 2020 he led the revision of "Annex SL" of the ISO Directives, that forms the basis for over 40 management system standards including those on environmental management (ISO 14001), Occupational Health and Safety (ISO 45001), Information Security (ISO 27001), Anti-bribery (ISO 37001), Food Safety (ISO 22000) and many more. Education Nigel Croft attended Oakwood Comprehensive School, Rotherham from 1967–1972 and subsequently Thomas Rotherham College (formerly Rotherham Grammar School). First in his family to go to university, he graduated with First Class Honours in Natural Sciences and with an Honorary Senior Scholarship from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1977. After a short period in industry, he returned to academia to carry out postgraduate research in Metallurgy and Materials Science at Sheffield University under the tutelage of Prof Sir Graeme Davies. He received a PhD in 1981 for his work on the fracture characteristics and mechanisms in cast steel, and was awarded the Brunton Medal for Research Excellence. In 1981, he received a Harkness Fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund, to conduct post-doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, on the low temperature impact strength of welds in microalloyed steel after induction bending for use in high pressure gas pipelines. Career Following a family tradition, Nigel Croft began his career in the local South Yorkshire steel industry, at British Steel Corporation’s Special Steels Division in Rotherham. He began work in the quality control department in 1974, first as a student apprentice, and later as a Graduate Metallurgist. After returning from post-doctoral research work in the USA, he joined J.P. Kenny and Partners as a Senior Metallurgist, working on supplier evaluations for high pressure gas pipelines in the North Sea and elsewhere. In 1984 he married Naila Diniz (also a PhD metallurgist from Sheffield University), and emigrated to Brazil. The two worked in the Diniz family-owned specialty steel company Eletrometal S.A. until the company was