I'm happy to have this chance to participate in the latest Scheme standardization process.
My first exposure to functional programming was CSE121, written about by Joel Spolsky (it was then taught in Franz Lisp). It definitely influenced how I approached programming, but it wasn't until I started graduate school at Indiana University that I was exposed to Scheme by Daniel Friedman and really dove in. I ended up doing my doctorate under him and certainly benefited from his strong intuitions. My research interests have centered around modeling effects in functional programs (whether state, multithreading, or logic programming), although I've also been interested in macro expansion. I'm currently coauthoring with Dan the next book in the "Little Schemer" series.
I've been lucky to be able to use Scheme at two startups in Silicon Valley. Although it was never the only language used, its expressiveness was a great asset in implementing complex processing. This gives me a practical perspective that balances the research-based one.
I'd like for Scheme to be the only language I need for prototyping ideas, getting things done quickly. In my opinion, the most essential characteristic of Scheme that we should strive to preserve is its simple but powerful operators. I'd like for a guiding principle to be not to design in a vacuum, but to leverage directly off of the great language that we have been given. That means being motivated by real examples of: 1) the reasonably few instances where Scheme falls short in expressing a programmer's intent and 2) difficulties in reusing code across implementations.
You can see more about me at my home page.