Wireless and Cellular Network Workshops

TIA Staff Contact: Florence Sumaray, 703.907.7471.

The Telecommunications Industry Association and RF Academics have teamed up to bring you a Wireless and Cellular Network Workshop Series through 2015.

Your instructors are Dr. Michael Dellomo and Dr. Rikin Thakker of RF Academics. A certificate is provided upon completion of each workshop.

Attendee comments:

"Great information delivered at the right speed and level of depth for non-engineers."
"For me the fundamentals of RF and cellular infrastructure and design were most interesting."
"Both instructors were very helpful in explaining in a way that I could understand."
"The whole workshop was interesting. I learned more practical aspects of cellular communications."

This workshop has no prerequisites.

Future Workshops

Workshop 5: Understanding LTE & LTE-Advanced / Dec. 2, 2015, Arlington VA

RF Academics Instructors

Dr. Michael Dellomo

Dr. Michael Dellomo is currently Associate Director of the Masters in Telecommunications Program at the University of Maryland. He was an Assistant Professor at SUNY Binghamton from 1984-1988. He then joined the MITRE Corporation, working on advanced signal processing and communications problems for naval contracts. During this time, he also taught courses at several colleges and universities in the Washington area.

In 1995, he left MITRE to work at Radio Dynamics Corporation where he later became CTO and VP of Research. There, he continued signal processing research, now aimed specifically at the commercial telecommunications market. He developed algorithms to optimize relocation strategies for emerging cellular companies in the late 1990s.

Dr. Dellomo joined the University of Maryland, College Park in 1998 and became an Assistant Research Professor. There, he created several graduate level courses for the Masters in Telecommunications program. He is now the Associate Director and Student Advisor to the program, and also a Scientific Development Officer for the Norbert Wiener Center at the University of Maryland since its inception in 2006.

He has worked on several DARPA grants, Multi-University Research Initiatives, and Maryland Industrial Partnership grants. He continues to conduct research on communications and RF processing using new and emerging technologies. He also continues to teach masters level telecommunications courses and received the inaugural Instructor of the Year award for the Telecom program in 2011.

Dr. Rikin Thakker

Dr. Rikin Thakker is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). He has over 15 years of experience in the field of cellular and wireless communications. He has helped design, deploy and maintain cell sites with 3G and 4G technologies for major cellular operators in the United States.

Before joining the university full time, he was working for CommScope as an Engineering Manager for their Active Wireless Products group. He also serves as a Senior Advisor and an Instructor for RF Academics – an initiative started by a group of elite professors to cater to industry's need of quality education at corporate speed.

Dr. Thakker earned his M.S. in Telecommunications from UMCP and his Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the George Washington University. His research tried to validate the "spectrum scarcity" notion by modeling the wireless ecosystem using System Dynamics techniques. His research interests include efficient spectrum management techniques, interference analysis and optimal allocation of spectrum, design of cell sites by employing co-siting techniques, in-building wireless capacity and coverage optimization, and system dynamics.