Excellence Awards for 2015 work
February 29, 2016
The 3GPP Excellence Awards have been distributed, showing the appreciation of the technical leadership for outstanding individual effort in 2015.
3GPP RAN1 - Radio layer 1 – group kept up its outstanding record of gathering excellence awards through the work of Havish Koorapaty as Rapporteur for the Release 13 Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) feature.
The next award was – unusually – given for an effort across two working groups (GERAN 1 and 2). John Diachina received the award for his contributions in Release 13 work items on Extended Coverage GSM (EC-GSM) and extended Discontinues Reception (eDRX).
The newest of 3GPP Working Groups – SA6 - scooped up an award for its work on mission critical applications. Yannick Lair was the recipient, for his effort and drive to deliver the new Mission Critical Push-to-Talk (MC-PTT) specification.
At the same time Ricky Kaura - CT1 - was rewarded with his Excellance Award, in recognition of his efforts to ensure that Stage-3 work on MC-PTT was completed in Release 13.
The technical leadership of 3GPP (the four TSG Chairmen) were presented with a record number of very strong nominations this year, which made the process of getting down to four Awards – the maximum allowed – a tricky one.
The awards were distributed to the recipients in the first quarter of the year and the Awards 'Roll of Honour' has been updated.
Postscript (May 2020): The above story mentions that the discussions, for the allocation of the 2015 Excellence Award were very tricky – due to the high number of high-quality nominations. We would like to place on record that - in this exceptional year - an additional Recognition Award was given to a very deserving expert, who was very much in the running for the Excellence Award, but who missed out this time. The leadership wanted to recognise Lixiang Xu’s contribution to the RAN3 work in Release 13, despite there being a strict limit on the number of Excellence Awards in the given year. The RAN WG3 Chair, Philippe Reininger, had nominated Lixiang Xu for her role in the work on RAN architecture and interfaces specifications, as rapporteur for two major Work Items and one Study Item. He particularly singled out Lixiang Xu's skilful and good-humoured management of the strong discussions on Enhanced Signalling for Inter-eNB CoMP. With this in mind, the Four TSG Chairs decided that Lixiang Xu should be given a special and unique Recognition Award. |
Contact for this article: Kevin FLYNN, Marketing and Communications Officer, 3GPP