Wireless Innovation Forum Announces President’s Award Winners; Welcomes New Board of Directors Members at Annual Meeting

WInnForum announces that it is honoring Mark Gibson of Commscope and Tom Willis of AT&T with this year’s coveted President’s Award at its Annual Meeting

WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES, December 11, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Wireless Innovation Forum (WInnForum) announces that it is honoring Mark Gibson of Commscope and Tom Willis of AT&T with this year’s coveted President’s Award at its Annual Meeting. In addition, the Forum warmly welcomes Monisha Ghosh of SpectrumX, Virgil Cimpu of Ericsson, and Masoud Olfat of Federated Wireless to its Board of Directors.

The President’s Award is given to individuals in recognition of their sustained outstanding contributions in support of the Wireless Innovation Forum and its activities.

Mark Gibson of Comsearch, a CommScope Company, provided invaluable information and insights that substantially supported the regulatory framework of CBRS and 6 GHz AFC systems. One of the most active contributors to the WInnForum, he worked with the FCC, NTIA, and DoD on multiple Forum projects and served as President of WInnForum as well as Chair of the Wireless Innovation Committee and 6 GHz Committee.

Throughout the development of the WInnForum’s 6 GHz specifications, recommendations, and reports, Tom Willis provided enormous technical support from the unique and critical perspective of a fixed microwave operator. He brought his position as one of the foremost experts on fixed microwave systems and propagation to our discussions and helped our development consider broad details and nuances that only he might know. In addition, his exhaustive work on the 6 GHz Test Vectors helped ensure that AFC systems were thoroughly tested against true real-world scenarios. AFC systems structure is exceedingly better because of Tom’s contributions.

“We have chosen two absolutely outstanding contributors to WInnForum and the industry. Mark and Tom both have provided invaluable input and leadership in the process” said Richard Bernhardt, the Forum Chair.

New board members unanimously approved by Forum membership include:

Monisha Ghosh is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. She is also the Policy Outreach Director for SpectrumX, the first NSF Center for Spectrum Innovation, and the co-chair of the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council (TAC) Working Group on Advanced Spectrum Sharing. Her research interests are in the development of next-generation wireless systems: cellular, Wi-Fi and IoT, with an emphasis on spectrum sharing and coexistence. Prior to joining the University of Notre Dame in 2022, she was the Chief Technology Officer at the Federal Communications Commission, a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, a Research Professor at the University of Chicago and spent 24 years in industry research at Bell Labs, Philips Research and Interdigital working on a wide variety of wireless systems: HDTV, Wi-Fi, TV White Spaces and cellular. She obtained her B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur in 1986 and Ph.D. from USC in 1991. She is a Fellow of the IEEE. She will serve as the Forum Board’s Academic Representative.

Virgil Cimpu has over 25 years of experience in the telecommunication industry, starting with 3G CDMA base station, followed by 3.5G UMTS Radio Node Controller, 4G LTE eNodeB and 5G NR gNB. With an employment history including Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson, Virgil is currently part of the RAN architecture system team at Ericsson where he is focusing on 6G and Dynamic Spectrum Sharing. As an Ericsson delegate to the WInnForum and OnGo Alliance, Virgil was one of the key contributors to the development of CBRS standards and he has been recognized by the OnGo Alliance with the Distinguished Service Award. Inside Ericsson, Virgil is one of the lead architects working on the development of an extensive line of Ericsson CBRS products, covering 4G and 5G technologies and addressing a wide spectrum of use cases, from indoor Radio Dot to outdoor AAS and from CSP deployments to private networks and neutral host deployments. Virgil’s other interests include Small Cells, Cloud RAN and Non-Terrestrial Networks. Virgil holds 16 granted patents. He will serve as one of the Forum’s Board’s At Large Directors.

Dr. Masoud Olfat is Vice President of Technology and Ecosystem Development at Federated Wireless and has led the technology development for different CBRS components, such as SAS, ESC, CBRS Device, the CBRS Certified Professional Installer development and training plan, CBRS security framework. He has also led the technology development and certification program for 6GHz AFC Development. He is the technology lead for Spectrum Sharing development in different spectrum bands as part of NTIA NSS (National Spectrum Strategy) implementation. He chairs several activities in multi-company standard activities, including the CBRS and AFC Test and Certification program, OnGo Alliance 4G and 5G Network Architecture. He is the lead of coordination activities among SAS Administrators and with Government entities (I-JWG). He has also been involved in the development of the 5th Generation (5G) of mobile wireless technologies in 3GPP. Dr. Olfat completed his PhD and post-doc studies in Wireless Communications at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2003, and has been an adjunct professor there and at other universities in the past 20 years. Before joining Federated Wireless, he managed numerous key projects essential to the deployment of 4G networks at Sprint Nextel, Clearwire, and Ligado (LightSquared), playing key role in the research and development of 4G technologies in global standardization communities such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and LTE, and ITU-R (International Telecommunication Unit), IMT-Advanced, and IMT-2020 requirements. He will serve as one of the Forum’s Board’s At Large Directors.

Continuing members include Mark Adrat (Fraunhofer FKIE), Richard Bernhardt (WISPA) (elected Chair/President), Andrew Clegg (Google), Mark Gibson (Commscope) (moved from Chair/President to At Large Member), David Gurney (Motorola Solutions), Colby Harper (Pathfinder Wireless) (moved to Chief Marketing Officer), Doug Knisely (Qualcomm) (moved to Large Company Representative), Prakash Moorut (Shure), Amit Mukhopadhyay (Nokia), Pierre Jean Muller (RED Technologies), Alberto Quintana (Indra), Naotaka Sato (Sony), Max Solondz (Verizon), Dawn Szelc (MITRE), Manuel Uhm (AMD).

The Board would like to extend gratitude to outgoing board members Paul Challoner and Jean Phillipe Delahaye of DGA.

To learn more about the Forum visit http://www.WirelessInnovation.org. The Forum is supported by Platinum Sponsor Shure.

Stephanie Hamill
Wireless Innovation Forum
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