Our People

Professor Harald Haas
Director of LiFi Research and Development Centre, Distinguished Professor of Mobile Communications

Professor Harald Haas FREng FRSE FIEEE FIET is the Director of the LiFi Research and Development Centre at the University of Cambridge. He is also the Initiator, co-founder, and Chief Scientific Officer of pureLiFi Ltd. He received the Ph.D. degree from The University of Edinburgh in 2001. He has authored 650 conference and journal papers, including papers in Science and Nature Communications. Haas’ main research interests are in optical wireless communications, hybrid optical wireless and RF communications, spatial modulation, and interference coordination in wireless networks. His team invented spatial modulation. He introduced LiFi to the public at an invited TED Global talk in 2011. This talk on Wireless Data from Every Light Bulb has been watched online over 2.79 million times. LiFi was listed among the 50 best inventions in TIME Magazine in 2011. He gave a second TED Global lecture in 2015 on the use of solar cells as LiFi data detectors and energy harvesters. This has been viewed online over 2.90 million times. In 2016, he received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Solid State Lighting Alliance. In 2019 he was recipient of IEEE Vehicular Society James Evans Avant Garde Award. Haas was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) in 2017. In the same year he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and was elevated to IEEE Fellow. In 2018 he received a three-year EPSRC Established Career Fellowship extension and was elected Fellow of the IET. Haas was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2019. He received an Humboldt Research Award in 2022. In 2023, he was shortlisted for the Eurorpean Patent Office Inventor Award in the category ‘Research’.

Adrian Sparks
Opto-Electronic Engineer

Adrian has been a member of the LiFi Research and Development Centre since 2018, working on high speed laser modulators and optical receivers. He is an experienced industrial research and development engineer with 15 patents granted. Previously he has led the development of RF over fibre and optical fibre sensing products which are now sold all over the world. He has a BSc in physics from the University of Bath and an MBA from the University of Essex. He enjoys skiing, cycling and running.

Dr Sina Bibadi
Optical Engineer

Sina received his BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from Azad Tehran University, Iran in 2005. After graduation, he worked as an electrical engineer on a construction site until 2012. He then received his M.Sc in Electrical and Power Electronics from the University of Bradford in 2011. In 2013, he started his PhD degree at Glasgow Caledonian University, where he graduated in 2017. His main research interests are in lighting systems, optical concentrators, lightguide and visible light communication.

Dr Cheng Chen
Research Associate

Cheng received his B.Eng degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Strathclyde in 2011. He went on to receive his M.Sc degree in Communications and Signal Processing from Imperial College, London in 2012. In 2017, he received his PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in Electrical Engineering. His research focuses on optical wireless communication, visible light communication and wireless communication for 6G. He has authored and co-authored 30 publications in these areas.

Dr Hossein Kazemi
Research Associate

Hossein received an M.Sc degree in Electrical Engineering (Microelectronic Circuits) from Sharif University of Technology, Iran in 2011. He then went onto receive an M.Sc degree (Hons) in Electrical Engineering (Wireless Communications) from Ozyegin University, Turkey in 2014, and his PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2019. His main research interests include communication theory, wireless communications and optical wireless communications.

Dr Iman Tavakkolnia
Assistant Professor

IMAN TAVAKKOLNIA is an Assistant Professor at the Electrical Engineering division at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research focuses on developing a fundamental understanding of the energy-efficiency of current and future telecommunication systems and lies at the frontier of communication theory, advanced materials, signal
processing, and optical communications. He also works on low-complexity optical space communication systems for small satellites. He is a coinvestigator on two EPSRC Future Communication Hubs in the UK (TITAN and HASC) as well as the project REASON under the Future Open Networks Research Challenge grant funded by the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). He was a working group member of the European COST Action, CA19111 NEWFOCUS, and an associate editor of the IEEE Communications Letters. He has been a co-chair of the optical wireless communication workshops in WCNC 2023, WCNC 2024, and GLOBECOM 2024, a local organizing committee member of ECOC 2023, and TPC member of several workshops and conferences. Iman Tavakkolnia obtained his PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2018. He was a research associate at the University of Edinburgh until 2020 and then at the University of Strathclyde until September 2021, before being appointed as the Strathclyde Chancellor’s Fellow (Lecturer) until February 2024.