Wessam Afifi

Dr. Afifi is currently a Sr. Staff Systems Engineer at LeapFrog Semiconductor, Inc.. From 2017-2021, he was a Senior/Staff Systems Engineer at Mavenir Systems in Richardson, Texas, where he was the company's delegate to xRAN Forum and O-RAN alliance. He received his Ph.D. degree from the ECE Department at the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ in 2016. In 2015, he was a wireless systems intern with Nokia Bell Labs, San Francisco, CA. Dr. Afifi has 6+ years of research experience with several top-tier conference and journal publications and 5+ years of industrial experience. He is a co-inventor of 35+ provisional and non-provisional patent applications and has several contributions to xRAN Forum, O-RAN alliance, and IEEE standards. In addition to system design, simulations, and standardization work, he has customer engagement, testing, debugging, and coding experience. Dr. Afifi’s research interest is in the areas of wireless communications and networking, with emphasis on open RAN, 5G NR, and unlicensed and shared spectrum technologies. In Jan. 2015, he won the GPSC Research and Project Grant. He won two best-poster awards at BWAC I/UCRCs in Apr. 2013 and Apr. 2016 and several other awards. He served as a TPC member and reviewer for many tier-1 conferences and journals.