Cicek Cavdar

Cicek Cavdar is a full professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, serving as Vice Head of the Communication Systems Department and Founding Director of SMART-6GSAT—Sweden’s first national 6G satcom center bringing together 22 partners from academia, satellite and telco industry and societal organisations. She leads the Intelligent Network Systems research group; her work spans AI-native and cloud-native network design and orchestration in with focus on cell-free massive MIMO, integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), drone communications and the convergence of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks. Her research targets most of the time two conflicting goals: resiliency and energy-efficiency and she likes to tackle this trade-off considering an end-to-end approach considering the joint orchestration of resources starting from cloud data centers, fronthaul/x-haul to the radio access networks. She has served as symposium chair in IEEE ICC 2016 in Paris. She has been active chairing several panels and workshops in IEEE Globecom, ICC, PIMRC and WCNC last 10 years in Non-terrestrial networks, AI assisted network management and green communications. She has led major EU initiatives for academia–industry collaboration, including 6G-SKY and RAI-6Green, and previously coordinated AI4Green, which received the 2024 EUREKA Innovation and Celtic Excellence Awards. Her team won the Scientific Excellence (Best Paper) Award at ASMS/SPSC 2025 for their work on disaggregated RAN in space and handover management in LEO mega-constellations. Cavdar has 160+ publications and several patents. She is a member of the editorial boards at IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking. She regularly serves the community as an editor, organizer, and keynote speaker.