Bio
Fernando J. Velez (M’93–SM’05) received the Licenciado, M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon in 1993, 1996 and 2001, respectively. Since 1995 he has been with the Department of Electromechanical Engineering of Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal, where he is Associate Professor, and he is also a Senior Researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações. Fernando was an IEF Marie Curie Research Fellow in King’s College London (KCL) in 2008/09 (OPTIMOBILE IEF) and a Marie Curie ERG fellow at Universidade da Beira Interior from 2010 until March 2013 (PLANOPTI ERG). He made or makes part of the teams of several European and Portuguese research projects on mobile communications and he was or is the coordinator of six Portuguese projects. . He has authored four books, 25 book chapters, 187 papers and communications in international journals and conferences, plus 40 in national conferences. Fernando is currently the IEEE VTS Region 8 (Europe and Africa) Chapter Coordinator (nominated by VTS in 2010) and was the elected IEEE VTS Portugal Chapter coordinator from 2006 until 2014. He is also officer of the Telecommunications Specialization of Ordem dos Engenheiros, the Portuguese Engineers Association. Prof. Velez was the coordinator of the WG2 (on Cognitive Radio/Software Defined Radio Co-existence Studies) of COST IC0905 “TERRA”.
Fernando J. Velez independently created a stable team with circa 10 members, currently including one post-doc fellow, three Ph.D. students, one M.Sc. student, one technician (who also is Ph.D. student) and several grantees. Six Ph.D. students succeeded in concluding their thesis from 2011 until 2014, and got prestigious positions in industry. He supervised four PhD students, 15 MSc students (also in cooperation with KCL and Aalborg University), more than 25 final year projects and circa 50 grantees. Fernando Velez has also been the main examiner in 14 Ph.D. (two simply as member of the jury) and more than twenty M.Sc. defenses in different Universities (including Aalborg University).
Awards: Fernando received twice (1996 and 1997) the Young Engineer Prize by Ordem dos Engenheiros (OE) the Portuguese Association for Engineers, also in (1996) from ICP/ANACOM (the Portuguese Telecommunications Regulator), the COMUNICAÇÕES 96 Award. Among different best paper awards with his research students, he received the Best Paper Prize in 3G 2004 - 5th IEE International Conference on 3G Mobile Communication Technologies. Awards included the Certificate of merit in “ANACOM URSI Portugal 2011”, and the “ANACOM URSI Portugal 2014” award, with the work “Enhanced multi-band scheduling for carrier aggregation in LTE-Advanced scenarios”.
Management experience: In the time span 2006-2015, Fernando has got four national projects approved as coordinator (CROSSNET, MobileMAN, OPPORTUNISTIC-CR and PROENERGY-WSN) and almost twenty projects approved as participant, one European project (UNITE) and CREaTION (Cognitive Radio Transceiver Design for Energy Efficient Data Transmission), a prestigious project in research lines of excellence approved by FCT in 2013.
New collaborations with other Universities, research centres or companies Fernando Velez managed to setup include Univ. Rome-la Sapienza, Univ. Carlos III, IP.Access, VTT, International Hellenic University (Greece) and Interv. Center, Oslo Univ. Hospital.
His main research areas are cellular planning tools, traffic from mobility, cross-layer design, RRM, spectrum sharing/coexistence/ aggregation, RF energy harvesting, wearable sensors and WBANS, and economic performance of advanced mobile communication systems.