Wireless Innovation Forum Announces President’s Award Winner; Welcomes New Board of Directors Members at Annual Meeting

Peter Young of Comsearch, an Andrew company, takes home this year’s coveted President’s Award at the Forum's Annual Meeting

WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES, December 15, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Wireless Innovation Forum (WInnForum) announces Peter Young of Comsearch, an Andrew company, as this year’s President’s Award at its Annual Meeting. In addition, the Forum welcomes Stuart Strickland of HPE/Aruba, Rauf Hafeez of Charter Communications, Farinaz Edalat of RFK Engineering, Ariful Hannan of Google and Navin Hathiramani of Nokia to its Board of Directors.

The President’s Award is given to individuals in recognition of their sustained outstanding contributions in support of the Wireless Innovation Forum and its activities. This year’s recipient, Peter Young of Comsearch, an Andrew company, served as the Chair of the WInnForum 6 GHz Committee when 6 GHz unlicensed band was just cleared by the FCC for 850 MHz of Standard Power Outdoor use; the process was in the regulatory phase and standards and guidance were needed. WInnForum worked closely with the Wi-Fi Alliance and the 6 GHz Multi-Stakeholder Group to begin that process. Young worked with Federal regulators, industry champions and even those opposed to the use of the band to reach a consensus. He guided the process and ensured all of the parties were talking, staying up to date, and covering the regulatory requirements.

"I am very pleased to announce Pete Young as our 2025 President's Awardee,” notes Richard Bernhardt, President of the Wireless Innovation Forum. "He is an absolute champion in the standards business and knows the technology inside and out. He is our choice because he brings forth exactly what is needed to get the job done and works to that end every day with all the parties. Our congratulations go to Pete for his wonderful work and accomplishments."

New board members unanimously approved by Forum membership include:

Stuart Strickland is Wireless CTO and an HPE Fellow at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. His team represents HPE in wireless standards, advances industry positions among regulators, operates a wireless lab for performance testing and algorithm development, and leads customer pilots of emerging technologies. Stuart is the principal architect of HPE’s Private 5G, Air Pass, and Open Locate initiatives, and has held leadership roles in the Wireless Broadband Alliance, Wi-Fi Alliance, and Wireless Innovation Forum. Stuart previously led Wi-Fi/small-cell convergence and hybrid location initiatives at Qualcomm, including development of the first time-based Wi-Fi ranging techniques.

Rauf Hafeez of Charter Communications is a wireless communications thought leader with a history of leveraging extensive research, development, and deployment expertise in wireless technology, architecture, spectrum strategy, and regulatory policy for Ericsson Research, AT&T and Charter Communications. He is an expert in shared spectrum and wireless communication system interference suppression, with a mission to make spectrum more accessible to more users.

Farinaz Edalat is the Director of System Engineering at RKF Engineering Solution, LLC, where she has been providing system engineering, analysis and regulatory support to many clients in both satellite and terrestrial communications fields for 18 years. Dr. Edalat led the sharing studies for the 6 GHz Coalition that resulted in the FCC opening 1200 MHz of spectrum for Radio Local Area Network (RLAN) device use in the U.S., as well as similar regulations in Europe and India. She also led development of the open-sourced Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) code (i.e. OpenAFC) for Broadcom, Cisco, Meta and Wi-Fi Alliance; supported certification of five Open AFC operators by FCC and one Open AFC operator by ISED; and continues leading its maintenance and advancement for the Open AFC Project led by Broadcom, CableLabs, Cisco, Wi-Fi Alliance Services Corporation and Wireless Broadband Association . She was actively engaged in the development of the WInnForum 6 GHz AFC specification documents.

Ariful Hannan Ariful Hannan works as an Engineering Manager at Google Cloud where his team is responsible for Spectrum Access System and AI on Google Distributed Cloud. Ariful was involved with 3.5 GHz in the very early stages of the FCC rulemaking process. He worked in several key working groups in WinnForum and OnGo to develop specifications for the three-tiered sharing model with other industry experts, regulatory bodies and DoD/ incumbents. Ariful, with other industry colleagues, was also involved in developing algorithms to make SAS autonomous and independent, while meeting the requirement of PART 96. Ariful became the Chairman of the Board of Directors of OnGo Alliance in May, 2025. Ariful has more than two decades of experience in Wireless Communication and Signal processing and was involved in many standard organizations including 3GPP. He holds over 40 patents in the areas of spectrum sharing, interference detection/cancellation and device positioning.

Navin Hathiramani is a Principal Standardization Lead in Nokia’s Technology Standards organization, bringing over 20 years of wireless communication experience spanning 2G through 6G. His expertise covers end-to-end design, network planning, product architectures, algorithm development and of course research and standardization. He has made significant contributions to 3GPP in areas such as Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS), NR-U, Carrier Aggregation, RedCap, and Network Energy Savings. For 6G, he is actively researching and leading topics related to Day-1 migration strategies, including MRSS, architectural evolution, and 6G radio physical layer design. Beyond 3GPP, he has contributed to the Wireless Innovation Forum, O-RAN, NextG-Alliance, Wi-Fi Alliance and OnGo-alliance. He has filed over 100 patents.

Continuing Board members include Colby Harper of Pathfinder Wireless, Richard Bernhardt of WISPA, Naotaka Sato of Sony, Andrew Clegg of Baylor University, Doug Knisely of Qualcomm, Sarvpreet Singh of Viavi Solutions, Masoud Olfat of Federated Wireless, Virgil Cimpu of Ericsson, Alberto Quintana of Indra, Pierre Jean Muller of RED Technologies, Dawn Szelc of MITRE, Monisha Ghosh of SpectrumX, Max Solondz of Verizon, David Gurney of Motorola Solutions, and Pete Young of Comsearch.

The Board would like to extend gratitude to outgoing board members Manuel Uhm of AMD, Prakash Moorut of Shure, Amit Mukhopadhyay of Verizon and Mark Gibson formerly of Comsearch.

To learn more about the Forum visit http://www.WirelessInnovation.org. The Forum is supported by Platinum Sponsor Shure.

Stephanie Hamill
Wireless Innovation Forum
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