Cicek Cavdar

Cicek Cavdar is a Full Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where she serves as Vice Head of the Department of Communication Systems and Founding Director of SMART-6GSAT—Sweden’s first national 6G satellite communications center, bringing together 22 partners from academia, the satellite and telecom industries, and societal organizations. She leads the Intelligent Network Systems research group. Her work spans AI-native and cloud-native network design and orchestration, with a focus on cell-free massive MIMO, integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), drone communications, and the convergence of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks.

Her research often addresses two conflicting goals: resiliency and energy efficiency. She is particularly interested in tackling this trade-off through an end-to-end perspective, considering the joint orchestration of resources from cloud data centers and fronthaul/x-haul networks to radio access networks. She served as a Symposium Chair at IEEE ICC 2016 in Paris and has actively chaired several panels and workshops at IEEE GLOBECOM, ICC, PIMRC, and WCNC over the past ten years in the areas of non-terrestrial networks, AI-assisted network management, and green communications.

She has led major EU academia–industry collaboration initiatives, including 6G-SKY and RAI-6Green, and previously coordinated AI4Green, which received the 2024 EUREKA Innovation Award and Celtic Excellence Award. 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. Prof. Cavdar has authored more than 160 publications and holds several patents. She is a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, and she regularly serves the research community as an editor, organizer, and keynote speaker.