Charla Rath

Christina Clark on June 14, 2022

Charla Rath is current co-chair of the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory

Committee (CSMAC) and former Verizon Vice President – Wireless Policy Development. At Verizon, Charla was responsible for developing and managing the company’s public policy initiatives related to spectrum management, particularly focusing on alternative spectrum auction mechanisms and sources of spectrum for next generation wireless networks, including 5G. Previously at Verizon Wireless, alongside the company’s business development and network planning groups, Charla identified and addressed the key policy and regulatory issues that enabled Verizon Wireless to secure a nationwide spectrum footprint.

Prior to joining Verizon Wireless, Charla was Vice President – Strategic Affiliations, of NextWave Telecom Inc. and Vice President of Freedom Technologies, Inc., a Washington, DC-based telecommunications consulting firm.

Charla also served as advisor to FCC Chairman Alfred C. Sikes on common carrier and spectrum policy issues and as a primary specialist in spectrum and internet policy at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

Charla has an MA in science, technology, and public policy from The George Washington University and a BSFS (Foreign Service) in international economics and finance from Georgetown University.

Janice Obuchowski

Christina Clark on June 14, 2022

Ms. Janice Obuchowski is President, CEO, and founder of Freedom Technologies.  She has held several leadership positions in the United States government and the private sector.  She was appointed by President George H.W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate to serve as Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information at the Department of Commerce (NTIA), where she led Executive Branch advocacy for passage of spectrum auction legislation.  She was also appointed to be United States Ambassador to the 2003 World Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, where she successfully spearheaded the U.S. push for international Wi-Fi adoption.  Earlier in her career, Ms. Obuchowski held several positions at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), including Senior Advisor to the Chairman. She was also an executive at NYNEX (now Verizon) and practiced private antitrust law.

Ms. Obuchowski serves or has served on several boards of directors, including Qualcomm (NASDAQ), Stratos Global (formerly a Bell Canada subsidiary, TSE), CSG International (NASDAQ), Inmarsat (LSE), and Orbital ATK (NYSE).

NOTABLE POSITIONS AND AWARDS INCLUDE:

  • Editor of the Georgetown Law Journal
  • Trustee of Mount St. Mary’s University, as well as other educational institutions and not for profit organizations
  • Member of the Commerce Department’s Spectrum Management Advisory Committee (CSMAC)
  • Elected Trustee of the Federal Communications Bar Association
  • Polish American of the Year 2005
  • Senior Fellow of the Annenberg Washington Program
  • World Economic Forum “Global Leader for Tomorrow”
  • Roman Catholic Order of Malta

Ms. Obuchowski earned a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center, where she was honored as Alumna of the Year in 2005.  She also attended the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, France, and graduated with Honors from Wellesley College.

Rafael A. Rodríguez Solís

Christina Clark on June 9, 2022

Rafael Rodriguez Solis is currently a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez.

His main interests are wideband and tunable microwave and millimeter-wave antennas and circuits, in particular for communication, radar, and body area network systems. He is the UPRM PI for the NOAA Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology Center (NOAA-CREST), the director of the UPRM Microwave and Millimeter-wave Systems Laboratory and the Institute of Research in Integrative Systems and Engineering (IRISE), and the coordinator for the UPRM Applied Electromagnetics Laboratory.

At this time, Rafael is working on the development of antennas for body-centric wireless communications, in the development of weather nowcast services for renewable energy applications, and in the development of compact microwave sensors for small UAVs. He is a senior member of the IEEE (Antennas and Propagation Society, Microwave Theory and Techniques Society, and Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society).

Monisha Ghosh

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Areas of Interest

Monisha Ghosh completed a term as the Chief Technology Officer at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on June 14, 2021. In this role she reported to the Chairman of the FCC and was closely involved with setting national strategy and technology specifications related to the explosive growth of broadband wireless communications technologies.

Prof. Ghosh previously served in the NSF as a rotating Program Director (IPA) within the Directorate of Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) where she managed wireless networking research. At the NSF, she initiated one of the first large-scale programs that targets applications of machine learning to wireless networks.

From 2015 to 2021, she also was a Research Professor at the University of Chicago, where she conducted research on wireless technologies for the 5G cellular, next-generation Wi-Fi systems, IoT, coexistence and spectrum sharing. She previously worked in industrial research and development at Interdigital, Philips Research, and Bell Laboratories on wireless systems such as the HDTV broadcast standard, cable standardization, and cognitive radio for the TV White Spaces.

She is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Danijela Cabric

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Research and Teaching Interests:

Wireless communications system design, machine learning for wireless communications, sensing and security, performance analysis and experiments on embedded platforms and software defined radios
Awards and Recognitions:
2020 Qualcomm Faculty Award
2018-2019 IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer
2012 NSF Career Award
2012 Hellman Fellow
2009 Okawa Foundation Award
2008 Samueli Fellow

Bert Hochwald

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Bertrand Hochwald, Ph.D., serves as the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Electrical Engineering and Co-Director of the Wireless Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Hochwald has invented and co-invented technologies and published research articles that have become mainstays of communication theory and practice, including differential multiple-antenna methods, linear dispersion codes, channel estimation analysis, and multi-user vector precoding methods.

He is currently working on high-frequency radio circuits, sixth-generation cellular technologies, and methods to reduce human exposure to electromagnetic radiation from cell phones. Hochwald also oversees one of the Wireless Institutes flagship projects, the RadioHound spectrum sensing platform, currently on its third version. This multi-year project is unique in that the sensors have been designed and implemented predominantly by a team of graduate students, and have been deployed in trials run by the Federal Communications Commission and the US Postal Service.

He holds 47 U.S. patents in wireless communication and is the recipient of several achievement awards while employed at the Department of Defense and the Prize Teaching Fellowship at Yale University. He has more than 125 publications, several of which have been listed by Thomson ISI as most-cited over multiple years. Hochwald has also served as an editor for several Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) journals. He has received several paper awards, including the 2018 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society’s Harold A. Wheeler Applications Prize Paper with student Ding Nie. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors. Thomson Reuters has awarded Hochwald “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds,” multiple times for the significant global impact of his work.

Hochwald believes that wireless communications methods are, after their first 100 years, still in their infancy, and if everyone understood their smartphones a little better, they would all want to design their own.

Bobby Weikle

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Robert M. Weikle, II received his B.S. in electrical engineering and physics from Rice University in 1986, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1987 and 1992, respectively. At Caltech, he developed a variety of new techniques for realizing and modeling arrays of coupled nonlinear active devices for microwave/millimeter-wave power combining. For this work, he shared the 1993 IEEE Microwave Prize. During 1992, Dr. Weikle was a postdoctoral research associate with the Department of Applied Electron Physics at Chalmers Tekniska Hogskola in Goteborg, Sweden where he
worked on millimeter-wave amplifiers based on high electron mobility transistors and low-noise terahertz mixers using superconducting hot electron bolometers.

In January 1993, Dr. Weikle joined the faculty of the University of Virginia where he is currently Professor in the Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. During this time, he has built a laboratory for millimeter and submillimeter-wave device characterization, circuit design, prototyping, and metrology and has pursued research on millimeter-wave and submillimeter-wave electronics, devices, and systems. Among his groups’ research efforts are design and fabrication techniques for submillimeter-wave integrated circuits, heterogenous integraton of III-V semiconductor devices with micromachined silicon, investigation of measurement instrumentation and calibration techniques for terahertz device and circuit characterization (including micromachined probes for submillimeter-wave on-wafer measurements), and research on planar antennas and quasi-optical components for millimeter-wave imaging and power-combining.

In 2011, Dr. Weikle co-founded Dominion Microprobes, Inc., with colleagues Scott Barker and Arthur Lichtenberger, to develop on-wafer probe technologies for terahertz measurements. He currently serves at its Chief Technology Officer.

Awards

  • IEEE Microwave Prize1993
  • David A. Harrison III Award, University of Virginia1999
  • All-University Teaching Award, University of Virginia 2001
  • Faculty Educational Innovation Award, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Virginia 2015
  • Edlich-Henderson Innovator of the Year Award, University of Virginia 2016

Research Interests

  • Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz Electronics
  • Wireless and Optical Communication Systems

Michael Honig

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Research Interests

My research interests are in the areas of communications, signal processing, and networks. My recent work has focused on wireless resource allocation, spectrum markets, and macroeconomic modeling.

Whitney Lohmeyer

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Whitney Lohmeyer is an Assistant Professor of Engineering at Olin College and a Research Affiliate at MIT in Aeronautics and Astronautics. She leads the Olin Satellite + Spectrum Technology & Policy (OSSTP) Group, and manages and contributes to the field of satellite communications systems. She also works closely with industry to advise on end-to-end system design, antenna systems, RF power amplification, radiation tolerance and spectrum strategy. Whitney is passionate about enabling affordable Internet access in order to generate economic growth and improve healthcare and education. Whitney was the first engineer hired at OneWeb, a company launching hundreds of low earth orbit communications satellites to provide global broadband and bridge the digital divide. While at OneWeb, she held a variety of roles both technical and policy-focused. As a Systems Engineer, she designed the RF Link Budget, and worked on the end-to-end communications system design, focusing on the LTE waveform and the user terminal antenna. In addition, she actively contributed to policy reform at the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and United Nations (UN) International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and represented OneWeb on the U.S. Delegation to the 2015 World Radio Conference, the culmination of a three-year regulatory review cycle. Prior to joining the OneWeb team, she worked as a hardware engineer at Google, and spent time in technical roles at Inmarsat and NASA. Whitney received her Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2015, and her M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2013, both funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. She earned her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from NC State University in 2011, as the only female in her class of approximately ninety students, and now currently serves on the board of North Carolina State University’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Department. She has been invited to speak at a variety of events including NC State’s 2018 MAE Commencement Ceremony, the UN Women’s Gender Equality and Mainstreaming (GEM) The Internet of Women: Challenge or Opportunity? and the UN’s and ITU’s Women’s Leadership Workshop on Empowering Women in Radiocommunications Negotiations.

INTERESTS

  • Satellite Communications
  • Wireless Communications
  • Satellite Systems
  • International Spectrum Policy
  • Principles of Wireless Communications

Thomas Marzetta

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Thomas Marzetta is Distinguished Industry Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and Director of NYU WIRELESS. Born in Washington, D.C., he received the Ph.D. and SB in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1972, and the MS in Systems Engineering from University of Pennsylvania in 1973. Prior to joining NYU in 2017, he had three industrial research careers: petroleum exploration (Schlumberger-Doll Research, 1978 – 1987), defense (Nichols Research Corporation, 1987 – 1995), and telecommunications (Bell Labs, 1995 – 2017). At Bell Labs, he directed the Communications and Statistical Sciences Department within the former Mathematical Sciences Research Center, and he was elected a Bell Labs Fellow. He originated Massive MIMO, one of the cornerstones of fifth-generation wireless technology. He is lead author of the book Fundamentals of Massive MIMO.

Professor Marzetta was on the Advisory Board of MAMMOET (Massive MIMO for Efficient Transmission), an EU-sponsored FP7 project, and he was Coordinator of the GreenTouch Consortium’s Large Scale Antenna Systems Project. Recognition for his contributions to Massive MIMO include the 2017 IEEE Communications Society Industrial Innovation Award, the 2015 IEEE Stephen O. Rice Prize, and the 2015 IEEE W. R. G. Baker Award. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2003, and he received an Honorary Doctorate from Linköping University in 2015.

Research Interests: Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output), Wireless technology

Education:

University of Pennsylvania, 1973
Master of Science, Systems Engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978
Doctor of Philosophy, Electrical Engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972
Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering