Adrian Loch Navarro

Title:

“From Academia to Industry: Insights from a

Transition”

Abstract:

In engineering, academia and industry often work on the same field of research. Yet, collaborations are typically limited due to confidentiality concerns. This talk highlights the synergies among both worlds building on a (non-confidential, published) example of such a collaboration in the field of state-of-the-art millimeter-wave communications. Further, the talk explores the similarities and differences among both worlds based on personal insights obtained from own experience as well as from colleagues across a number of research institutions and large tech companies. This includes a discussion on the type of work one can do as an engineer in both domains, a sketch on possible ways to transition among those domains, and some conclusions on the most challenging factor both in academia as well as in industry---the human factor. Please note that the content of this talk is not specifically related to my current employer but captures a broad range of learnings gathered from many contributors.

Short-Bio:

Adrian Loch is a system engineer at Apple, Inc. Prior to joining Apple, he worked as a Wireless Modem Engineer at Intel Corporation in Munich, Germany. His start at Intel marked a transition to industry after seven years as a researcher in academia. This academic period included three years as a post-doc researcher at IMDEA Networks in Madrid, Spain, as well as four years as a research associate at the Secure Mobile Networking Lab at Technische Universität Darmstadt. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 2015, after graduating in Electrical Engineering from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Technische Universität Darmstadt in 2011 as part of an international double degree program.