Meet the new Bell Labs Fellows

Every year, Nokia selects a handful of its most accomplished technical staff for a singular honor, the Bell Labs Fellow Award. The Fellowship represents the highest level of achievement at Nokia in the areas of research and development and is reserved for individuals who, over the span of their careers, have made outstanding and sustained contributions to Nokia and the communications industry.

Since the program’s inception in 1982, only 336 people have been received the honor. At a ceremony in Finland on Tuesday, Nov. 16, six new Bell Labs Fellows joined their ranks. They are:

• Matthew Andrews: A globally recognized researcher in the field of wireless data scheduling, Andrews’ work has formed the foundation of many Nokia products, and his papers on the topic been cited hundreds of times in the industry. Today, he is leading the analytics component of Nokia Bell Labs’ high-profile AeroFarms monitoring project.
• Igor Curcio: Renowned for his innovation in video codecs, Curcio headed up a multi-site video research program that greatly contributed to H.264 video standardization, and he has played a significant role in the development of multiple widely used video technologies. He is currently leading research and standardization in multimedia systems at Nokia Technologies.
• Gino Dion: Dion’s contributions to IP video have helped build the business case for massive broadband investments all around the world. He developed many of the key concepts and technologies for IP video and was a lead architect of some of the earliest IP video network launches. Today Dion is collaborating with the industry’s largest webscale players in the development and standardization of multimedia distribution protocols.
• Ed Harstead: An expert in mass-scale optical access, Harstead was the lead optical systems engineer for the very first PON deployments, pioneering optical access 10 years before the advent of DSL. He has heavily influenced industry’s direction in high-speed TDM-PON technology, and most recently Harstead has been a key innovator in 25G standards, helping Nokia bring the first symmetrical 25G PON solution to market
• Björn Jelonnek: Jelonnek’s high-end-algorithm work has propelled Nokia to a leading position in RF bandwidth performance. That work is one of the main reasons for success of Nokia’s Reefshark Digital Front End. Highly regarded among his industry peers and Nokia colleagues, Jelonnek has tutored many at Nokia. Some of those students have gone on to become Bell labs Fellows themselves.
• Esa Tiirola: At heart, Tiirola is an inventor. In the last 21 years, Nokia has filed about 310 patent families related to mobile communications based on Tiirola’s inventions, and two of his key LTE patents were Nokia nominees for the European Inventor Award. Since 2010, Esa has been working on 5G physical-layer development.

To learn more about the individual Fellows and their achievements, you can watch the following video, which provides an exclusive look into the Bell Lab Fellows ceremony:

In the photo featured at the top of the post, the Bell Labs Fellows are (from left to right): Igor Curcio, Ed Harstead, Gino Dion, Björn Jelonnek, Matthew Andrews and Esa Tiirola