Dr. Jie Zhang, is the Founder and the Chief Scientific Officer at Ranplan. He has also held the Chair in Wireless Systems at the University of Sheffield on a part-time basis since January 2011. Prior to his current appointments, he studied and worked at Imperial College London, Oxford University, University of Bedfordshire, and East China University of Science and Technology (PhD in 1995), reaching the rank of Lecturer, Reader and Professor in 2002, 2005 and 2006 respectively. He has pioneered research in small cells and HetNets and published landmark papers in these fields of research that have received more than 8,000 citations and two of them more than 1,000 citations each. His research interests are centered on wireless communications in the built environments, including indoor wireless network planning/optimization, radio propagation modeling, wireless friendly building design, metamaterials, metasurfaces, data-driven network optimization. He has published over 300 journal and conference papers. Since 2003, as principal investigator (PI) or a co-investigator, he has been awarded over 40 grants by Innovate UK, EPSRC and the EC FP6/FP7/H2020/Eurostars, having vast management experience in research and development (in industry and academia)