Jan Söderström is Vice President and Head of Technology Office Silicon Valley at Ericsson reporting to Ericsson Group CTO. In this capacity he drives the Ericsson technology leadership work in 5G, Cloud and IoT in a collaboration with ecosystem partners in Silicon Valley. A central part in this work is the co-creation work in D-15 Labs, enabling partners and customers to develop and test new use cases on a real 5G network platform.

Jan has a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Chalmers University of Technology, augmented with a one-year research scholarship at California Institute of Technology. He spent his early industrial career working with optoelectronic devices and optical networking at Ericsson Microelectronics, first as development manager and later as product line head. He then had a decade long engagement at Ericsson Research heading the research in IP and Cloud. During this time, he spent three years in Silicon Valley building up the Ericsson Research lab in San Jose. He started the Ericsson engagement in SDN and OpenFlow in cooperation with the Stanford Clean Slate Program and his team also pioneered the Ericsson work on OpenStack and cloud orchestration.

In 2013 Jan moved to Business Unit Networks to drive the Ericsson Cloud transformation initiative. He held the roles of Head of Product line Cloud, Head of Target Area Cloud and Head of the NFV-Program until he moved to his current position in early 2018.

Meral Shirazipour is Director of Innovation Engagements at D-15 Labs in Ericsson’s Technology Office Silicon Valley. She has been with Ericsson as a graduate student since 2003 and officially since 2010 holding various R&D roles. She has been involved in network optimization, software defined networking, network monitoring, etc. She has been Ericsson’s delegate in standards bodies such as the open networking foundation, member of Ericsson Garage initiative, packet technologies research area, artificial intelligence research area and often interfacing with customer related projects and working with various verticals.

Before joining the D-15 Labs Meral was leading ecosystem engagements for XR, engaging cross organizationally with various teams in Ericsson. Meral was responsible for establishing partnerships with various companies and startups covering the end-to-end XR landscape, such as operators, game engine companies, head mounted display companies, server/GPU, content developers. In this role Meral has been investigating and shaping the strategy for XR in a 5G/Edge compute setting. She has also been guiding the company’s standardization and open-source activities in the field.

Meral holds a PhD degree in computer engineering from École Polytechnique de Montréal and holds more that 30 patents and many publications; she is also involved in peer reviews of various R&D initiatives and grant applications.

Yashar Nezami is working as Ecosystem Co-creation Director in Ericsson and representing Network Business Unit and Network Products Development Unit at D-15 Labs in Ericsson’s Technology Office in Silicon Valley. He has been with Ericsson since 2008 and holding various R&D management and technical roles. As an intrapreneur, he has been promoting the execution of RAN and baseband functions on commercial of the shelves hardware (CoTS) and was responsible to drive several research projects focusing on LTE and NR on CoTS Predevs (x86, FPGA and GPU) for 4 years in collaboration with key CoTS partners and start-ups. Yashar holds granted patents around 5G, LTE, platform optimization and AI in Radio.

Before joining the D-15 Labs, Yashar was System Solution and Architecture Manager in PDU Radio focusing on ORAN prototyping, AI/ML in Radio and AAS Radio system management.

As Ecosystem Co-creation director, he is pushing 5G beyond eMBB and looking forward to collaborating with partners and customers to define use cases which can scale the 5G development beyond smartphones and show case them at our unique D15-Lab in Silicon Valley.