Imagine Live Eurolab Innovation Day 2025

Jan-Peter Meyer-Kahlen is Head of the Ericsson ICT Development Center Ericsson Eurolab in Herzogenrath close to Aachen.

Jan-Peter has been with Ericsson for more than 30 years. During this time he has held several senior management positions in Germany, Canada, and Sweden, for various product and service responsibilities within mobile networks R&D, global customer support and cloud system solutions development.

Jan-Peter Meyer-Kahlen holds a Diploma Degree in Communications Systems Engineering from the Technical University RWTH Aachen.

Daniel Leimbach (44) is Head of of Sales and Managing Director of Ericsson in Germany.

Mr. Leimbach has been working in the telecommunications industry for over 20 years. Initially, he worked for five years at Alcatel, among others in the sales area with

Deutsche Telekom. After his MBA, he continued his career at Ericsson from 2007. Since then, he has held various management positions as Vice President, worked within the Ericsson Group in Asia and was responsible for the business with Telefónica and Vodafone in Germany.

Mr. Leimbach holds an MBA from the University of Oxford, a Diploma in Business Administration (BA) and a bachelor’s degree from the Open University of London.

Mr. Leimbach is married, has one child and lives with his family in Düsseldorf.

Vera Simon is a Strategic Product Manager in the Signaling product area from the R&D center in Herzogenrath. Even though being early on in her career with only 5 years in Ericsson and the Telecom industry, Vera brings extensive experience from her previous roles across different countries, including Product Management in Sweden and Data & Cloud Specialist in Mexico, that she completed through Ericsson’s Early Career Program.

With her Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from RWTH Aachen University and a strong background as a Developer in cloud technologies, machine learning, and data science, Vera has driven innovation in the field of AI. This led her to present as a business builder on the Innovation Day herself 3 years ago. Her work blends technical expertise with leadership and engaging with both internal and external stakeholders.

Vera is passionate about innovation, sustainability, and fostering collaborative environments, she combines international experience with a commitment to driving technological progress and customer-centric solutions.

Matthias Sauder has been Director Networks of o2 Telefónica in Germany since February 2020.  

He and his team are focused on evolving o2 Telefónica’s core, access and transport network towards a customer-centric network, which is delivering connectivity to more than 45 million customers in Germany.

Driving transformation has been top of mind. Main focus areas are currently coverage and quality enhancements, 5G development and rollout, cloud at scale and driving innovations. This includes driving the OpenRAN and CloudRAN ecosystem, introducing SDN in the transport network, shaping energy saving solutions and transforming the mobile core into a cloud-native core. AI/ML is top of mind particularly in the light of operational excellence and energy efficiency.

Before joining o2 Telefónica in Germany, Matthias Sauder has held different leadership roles at Vodafone in Germany and the Netherlands and built a track record in developing high performing teams, delivering key projects to the business and pushing innovations.

In all roles his top priority has been and will be to deliver the best possible customer experience.

Mischa Dohler is VP Emerging Technologies at Ericsson Inc. in Silicon Valley, working on cutting-edge topics of 5G/6G, AR and Generative AI. He serves on the Spectrum Advisory Board of Ofcom and on the AI/ML Technical Advisory Committee of the FCC.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET); the AP Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA); and a Distinguished Member of Harvard Square Leaders Excellence. He is a serial entrepreneur with 5 companies; composer & pianist with 5 albums on Spotify/iTunes; and fluent in several languages. He has had ample coverage by national and international press and media, and is featured on Amazon Prime.

Petr Lédl is SVP and Head of Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs), Deutsche Telekom's central Research & Development division. His main responsibility is exploring disruptive technology trends with focus of future network technologies.

He studied Electrical Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague between 1995 and 2004. Since 2003 he has been working on different positions in Technology organizations of Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile Czech Republic.

Senior Researcher Ericsson ConsumerLab; Ericsson’s consumer insight and foresight unit part of Ericsson Research.

In her previous role as Head of Innovation for Ericsson Middle East and Africa, based in Dubai, she led and oversaw initiatives aimed at driving innovation across the region.

Maya has a diverse background, starting her career with Volvo Construction Equipment in Sweden as a Trade Finance Manager, overseeing the Middle East and Central Asia.

Relocating to the UAE, she further expanded her expertise in the finance sector, working across both private and corporate banking as well as managing single family office between UAE and the Netherlands.

Maya holds an Executive MBA-Financial Management from Stockholm School of Economics and a MSc in Business Management from Stockholm Business School Sweden

Gerald Bedürftig is Lead Architect of the Federal Agency for Public Safety Digital Radio of Germany (BDBOS). With his team he is defining the target architecture of the next generation Digital Radio network. In addition, he is supervising the currently running Network Modernization of the existing TETRA network from an architectural perspective.

Prior to joining BDBOS Gerald has been working for SIEMENS, NOKIA SIEMENS and NOKIA. Starting in the system test of network management systems for transport networks he became project leader of different development and research projects. Within NOKIA SIEMENS and NOKIA he has been Senior Service Product Manager, being responsible for a service portfolio for planning and optimization of IP-Transport networks of Mobile Network Operators.

Gerald studied Physics at the University of Hannover and made his PhD in Theoretical Physics.

Faseela is an Experienced Cloud-native Developer at Ericsson, and a member of the Technical Oversight Committee of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. She has given talks and workshops at several conferences evangelizing CNCF projects, including the recent KubeCons. She is the co-chair for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe and North America, 2025. She is a CNCF Ambassador, LFX Mentor, and the winner of the prestigious CNCF “Chop Wood Carry Water” award, 2023. She is also the creator of "Izzy saves the Birthday", a children's illustrated book from Istio Service Mesh.

Peter is working at Ericsson as a Technology Expert both in Aachen, Germany and Stockholm, Sweden. As a Technology Expert in the area of Deployment Architectures and Serviceability he is responsible for technology evolution, technology strategy and architecture to deliver, deploy and operate Ericsson’s products efficiently in various contexts.

Peter has held different positions in R&D and IT within Ericsson working with cloud infrastructure and cloud-native applications in R&D, IT operations and standardization. Currently he focuses on automation for deployment and operations using declarative concepts (GitOps) and pipelines.

Peter has a Master’s Degree (Diplom Ingenieur) in Electrical Engineering and Communication from RWTH (Technical University) Aachen, Germany.