Miquel Payaró

Miquel received the Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. degrees from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 2002 and 2007, respectively. From September 2005 to February 2006 he held a visiting research appointment at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. From February 2007 to December 2008 he was a Post Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

Currently, Miquel is a Research Director (R4) at the Services as networkS (SaS) Research Unit at the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), which he joined in 2009. Since January 2022, Miquel is also serving as Director of Open Innovation and Science, where he promotes the participation of CTTC researchers in actions and programs related to entrepreneurship and start-up/spin-off creation, manages and promotes the IPR assets of CTTC. He is also serving as the Security Officer of CTTC, making sure that CTTC’s infrastructure, processes, and personnel have the appropriate security clearance level in projects where classified information is managed. Miquel has a personal security clearance that goes up to EU SECRET (and equivalent level at Spanish, NATO and ESA domains).

Previously, from 2013 to 2021 he was the Head of the Communications Technologies Division (CTD) at CTTC. The CTD was created in April 2013 and was the home of about 20 permanent researchers and up to 10 temporary staff and visitors. Miquel was the main editor and coordinator of the sections related to the CTD within the CTTC Strategic and Functional Plan, where the main research lines and key areas and technologies for the future were defined. He also led the recruiting process within CTD, serving as President for all the evaluation committees. In 2014 and 2017, the CTD was awarded the Consolidated Research Group category by the Catalan government, which was endowed in both occasions with associated research funds (only top research groups are funded). Before his role as Head of the CTD, Miquel was appointed Head of the Engineering Unit from January 2011 to March 2013. Within the Engineering Unit, besides conducting his own research, he coordinated the R&D activities of a group of around 20 researchers. After his two-year term, the Engineering Unit achieved an R&D income increase of more than 70 % with respect to the previous years. From September 2017 to December 2019, Miquel was appointed a board member of the 5G Infrastructure Association (5G IA) and he also represented CTTC in the steering boards of NetWorld2020 and Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF). Miquel was re-elected as a board member of the 5G IA in September 2018 and as a member of the NetWorld2020 steering board in December 2018. During this period, Miquel was involved in different task forces and working groups that generated several white papers, mainly related to the deployment of 5G in Europe and its applications for vertical industries.

Since 2009, Miquel has led and participated in several research contracts with the industry (with companies like Aviat Networks or GMV) as well as in research projects from the Seventh Framework Program and H2020 of the EC, such as BuNGee, BeFEMTO, or Newcom#. From July 2015 to June 2017, Miquel served as Technical Manager in the H2020 / 5G PPP project Flex5Gware. In Flex5Gware (a 17-partner and 8 M€ project), flexible, reconfigurable HW/SW communication platforms for fifth-generation (5G) mobile services and applications were studied and key building blocks were prototyped. Miquel served as Project Coordinator in the 5G PPP 5GCroCo project. In 5GCroCo (a 24-partner and 18 M€ project), Miquel coordinated the efforts to validate in the field different service continuity solutions in cross-border scenarios for Connected and Automated Mobility (CAM) scenarios. Within the Spanish National Plan, Miquel has participated in five consecutive projects, being the Principal Investigator in two of them (AEThER and 5G-TRIDENT).

Miquel is a Senior Member of IEEE and served as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2016-2021) and has been Guest Editor of the Transactions on Emerging Telecommunication Technologies 2015 Special Issue on “Enabling 5G: energy and spectrally efficient communication systems.” He has also served as part of the Organizing Committee of EUSIPCO 2011, European Wireless 2014 (Publicity co-Chair), ICASSP 2020 (serving as Finance Chair) and has been the TPC Chair of the CLEEN workshop in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. Miquel has also co-organized special sessions and workshops in international conferences like Globecom, ICC or EuCNC and has given invited talks both in academia and in industry events (e.g., at Orange Labs, Nokia-Bell-Labs, etc.).

As far as his scientific and technical interests are concerned, Miquel’s background is on signal processing theory for wireless communication systems and the scope of his research has progressively shifted towards addressing aspects related to experimentation and practical implementation, with a clear focus on 5G and beyond systems. Miquel is coauthor of 20 book chapter and journal publications and 50+ conferences and has supervised 2 PhD theses. He has been invited to be part of the evaluation committee in 10 PhD defenses and is serving as a reviewer for the French ANR.