Company

Mike Hickey held the position of Chief Executive Officer at Wolfson Microelectronics from January 2009 until its acquisition by Cirrus Logic Inc in Sept 2014. Mike joined Wolfson from Motorola Inc. where he was Senior Vice President & General Manager of Multimedia Mobile Products. Prior to joining Motorola, he served as Chief Executive Officer of Alcatel Optronics UK, Chief Executive Officer of Kymata Ltd and also held senior positions at Motorola, Digital Equipment and Philips. He has also served as a director of Motorola Ltd and as a non-executive director at Incline Global Technology Services Ltd and UIQ Technologies.

Professor Harald Haas received the PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2001. He currently holds the Chair of Mobile Communications at the University of Edinburgh, and is the initiator, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of pureLiFi Ltd as well as the Director of the LiFi Research and Development Center at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interests are in optical wireless communications, hybrid optical wireless and RF communications, spatial modulation, and interference coordination in wireless networks. He first introduced and coined spatial modulation and LiFi. LiFi was listed among the 50 best inventions in TIME Magazine 2011. Prof. Haas was an invited speaker at TED Global 2011, and his talk: “Wireless Data from Every Light Bulb” has been watched online more than 2.5 million times. He gave a second TED Global lecture in 2015 on the use of solar cells as LiFi data detectors and energy harvesters. This has been viewed online more than 2 million times. Professor Haas holds 31 patents and has more than 30 pending patent applications. His Google Scholar h-index is 67, and his work has been cited more than 21k times. He has published 400 conference and journal papers including a paper in Science. He co-authors a book entitled: “Principles of LED Light Communications Towards Networked Li-Fi” published with Cambridge University Press in 2015. Prof. Haas is editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications and IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technologies. He was co-recipient of recent best paper awards at VTC-Fall, 2013, VTC-Spring 2015, ICC 2016 and ICC 2017. He was co-recipient of the EURASIP Best Paper Award for the Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking in 2015, and co-recipient of the Jack Neubauer Memorial Award of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. In 2012, he was the recipient of the prestigious Established Career Fellowship from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) within Information and Communications Technology in the UK. In 2014, he was selected by EPSRC as one of ten RISE (Recognising Inspirational Scientists and Engineers) Leaders in the UK. In 2016, he received the outstanding achievement award from the International Solid State Lighting Alliance. In 2017, he was awarded an EPSRC Fellowship Extension. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2017.

Throughout his career, Mark has played key roles at several companies, from start-ups to large corporations, holding executive management positions in business development, programme management, marketing, and R&D. Mark brings experience in the semiconductor, telecom, defence and consumer sectors, having made an impact at companies as diverse as Cirrus Logic, Avanex, Alcatel, Wolfson Microelectronic, Optoscribe, and BAE Systems. He successfully co-founded and established Oligon Ltd in 2005; the business was acquired by Wolfson Microelectronics plc in January 2007. Mark obtained his bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He holds a number of MEMS- and optical-related technology patents.