Careers in Practicing and Research Engineering
Wednesday, 7 June 2023, 16:00-17:30, Congress Hall
Organizer
- Luis M. Correia (Prof. IST/INESC-ID – University of Lisbon, PT)
Motivation and Background
Having a career in the area of communications has always been an interesting and challenging one, i.e., technology evolves very fast, every decade a new wireless cellular system emerges, the centre of the area has changed from a very physical basis to one based on software, new technologies have invaded the “traditional” areas and the economic landscape of the business changes also at a high speed, just to name a few aspects. The number of students in the area has been decreasing in recent years in many countries, due to a growing attractiveness of other areas of technologies (even within ICT in general) and a perception that Telecommunications are not “modern” any more. As a consequence, there’s a shortage of graduates in this area and organisations are facing difficulties in hiring qualified human resources that can be part of their teams. A contribution for the solution to this problem is to present what’s a career in communications, the general conditions that are available, the benefits offered to collaborators and the problems that are currently being addressed, among other matters. This panel addresses these aspects and provides an opportunity for a follow on exchange of information, between hiring organisations and graduate students or recently graduated ones.
Questions
- What are the differences between a career in research or in practicing engineering?
- What are the differences between a career in industry or in academia?
- What are the differences between a career in large industries or in start-ups?
- Is there a strong mobility of jobs between the different companies?
- How important is the first job to define a career?
Participants
The panel is composed of (see CVs below):
- Chair: Luis M. Correia (Prof. IST/INESC-ID – University of Lisbon, PT)
- Anki Ljung (Ericsson, SE)
- Lena Wosinska (U. Chalmers, SE)
- Jane Jeffreys (Huawei, DE)
- Patryk Urban (West Pomeranian Univ. Szczecin, PL)
- Ömer Bulakc (Nokia, DE)
Luis M. Correia
Luis M. Correia was born in Portugal, in 1958. He received the Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from IST (Univ. Lisbon) in 1991, where he is currently a Professor in Telecommunications, with his work focused on Wireless & Mobile Communications, with the research activities developed in the INESC-ID institute. He has acted as a consultant for the Portuguese telecommunications operators and regulator, besides other public and private entities, and has been in the Board of Directors of a telecommunications company. He has participated in 33 projects within European frameworks, having coordinated 6 and taken leadership responsibilities at various levels in many others, besides national ones. He has lectured 76 advanced training courses for industry and academia at the national and international levels. He has supervised over 230 M.Sc./Ph.D. students, having edited 6 books, contribute to European strategic documents, and authored over 500 papers in international and national journals and conferences, for which served also as a reviewer, editor and board member. Internationally, he was part of 40 Ph.D. juries, and 78 research projects and institutions evaluation committees for funding agencies in 12 countries, and the European Commission and COST. He has been the Chairman of Conference, of the Technical Programme Committee and of the Steering Committee of 25 major conferences, besides other several duties. He was a National Delegate to the COST Domain Committee on ICT. He has launched and served as Chairman of the IEEE Communications Society Portugal Chapter, besides being involved in several other duties in this society at the global level. He is an Honorary Professor of the Gdańsk University of Technology (Poland) and a recipient of the 2021 EurAAP Propagation Award “for leadership in the field of propagation for wireless and mobile communications”.
Anki Ljung
Anki Ljung is the Head of Talent Acquisition at Ericsson in Sweden. With over seven years of experience at Ericsson, Anki is responsible for leading talent acquisition efforts. She has also held various leadership positions in HR and business development at Manpower Group, where she was responsible for talent management, change management, employer branding, leadership development, and more.
Lena Wosinska
Lena Wosinska received her PhD degree in Photonics and Docent degree in Optical Networks from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, where she became Full Professor of Telecommunication. At KTH she established and led a highly recognized research group working on optical networks. Currently she is a Research Professor with the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, where she moved together with her team. Her research broadly concerns optical communications and networks, with a focus on fiber access and 5G/6G transport networks, energy and cost efficiency, optical data center networks, photonics in switching, network control, reliability, security, and survivability, incl. application of ML/AI in solving various research problems. Recently, she received IEEE ComSoc ONTC Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for Pioneering Research in Optical Networks. She has been involved in many expert assignments, had a leading role in several EU projects, as well as coordinating national and international research projects.
Jane Jeffreys
Jane Jeffreys brings over 8-years of experience in various Human Resources positions, earned in a number of industries and locations across Financial Services, Consulting and ICT in Australia, Ireland and Germany. Beginning her career within Recruitment, Jane brings a diverse skill set touching on attracting talent, balancing internal stakeholders and oversee the full recruitment cycle. As a Senior HR Business Partner, Jane has further developed her profile in international and culturally diverse organizations touching upon a variety of topics within the full employee lifecycle such as recruitment, onboarding, career development, talent management, compensation and benefits, compliance and legal. Jane brings a passion for talent development and has cultivated a progressive and culturally open approach to her current HR Business Partner role at Huawei’s Munich Research Center supporting business leaders across multiple technical functions within the ICT space. Jane also brings experience within a variety of ICT organizations, supporting from a HR perspective mature research focused laboratories as well as growing organizations.
Patryk Urban
Patryk Urban, PhD, DSc, is an associate professor and the Head of Optical Reference Network Laboratory at the Department of Telecommunication and Photonics at the West Pomeranian University in Szczecin, Poland. He has been business and technology consultant to startups and SMEs: SeQure Quantum (focused on quantum random number generators), Nevomo (focused on sensing and communications for high-speed railway), InPhoTech (focused on multi-core fibers). He has been a co-founder of Wave General – the owner and the operator of WaveJobs (portal on photonics jobs). In 2009-2018 he was a Senior Researcher at Ericsson AB in Stockholm (focused on fiber optic access networks). Patryk has a PhD in fiber-optic access networks from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, 2009, and DSc (habilitation) in Telecommunications from the Warsaw University of Technology, 2017. He has organized and participated in many research collaboration projects inside and outside Europe as a research engineer or manager. He is also a founder and first chairman of IEEE Photonics Sweden Chapter, 2013-2018, and chairman of IEEE Photonics Poland Chapter, 2019. He is an author or coauthor of nearly 100 publications and 50 granted patents and contributions to standardization groups. In 2020-2022 he ran series of interviews on career development for IEEE Photonics News with CEOs, researchers, scientists at different career stage.
Ömer Bulakci
Dr. Ömer Bulakci is the 6G Program Manager at Nokia, Germany, and the Chairman of the 5GPPP 5G/B5G Architecture Working Group. He received the degrees of B.Sc. (METU, Turkey, 2006), M.Sc. (TUM, Germany, 2008), and doctorate (Aalto University, Finland, 2013, formerly TKK). He worked at Nokia Siemens Networks, Germany on LTE-Advanced relaying (2009-2012), in support of his doctorate. From 2012 till February 2020, he conducted research toward 5G system, contributed to EU flagship projects METIS, METIS-II (leading work package on RAN synchronous control plane), and 5G-MoNArch (leading work package on overall architecture/E2E slicing), and contributed to the 5G standardization at Huawei GRC, Germany. He is an author/co-author of 75+ technical publications (including book chapters and book editorships) and is an inventor of 110+ patent families/patent family applications. His current research interests comprise E2E network slicing, RAN architecture evolution, and 6G system architecture design and analysis.
