Stories by Corbett Rowell
Prof. Dr. Corbett Rowell holds a bachelor’s degree in physics (honors) from the University of California, a master’s degree in EEE from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and a Ph.D. degree in EEE from Hong Kong University.
From 1996 to 2005, he worked extensively in the mobile antenna design industry, developing some of the first internal antennas for mobile phones working directly for antenna manufacturers and as CEO of the first internal antenna design companies in Asia. He served as a R&D director at the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute for almost a decade, where he focused on advanced RF systems.
In 2013, he joined China Mobile Research Institute as an R&D director responsible for the development of massive MIMO base-stations for 4.5G and 5G FR1. After China Mobile, he was an electrical engineering professor in Kazakhstan and an honorary adjunct professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for two years.
Since 2016, he has been working in Rohde & Schwarz (Germany) in different roles: as a project lead engineer developing 3GPP conformance over-the-air testing systems and as a R&D Director for the Mobile Network Testing hardware group, whose products include RF scanners, wideband down-convertors, and PC-based demodulation algorithms.
He has written over 40 papers in top journals and holds over 100 granted patents worldwide. His interests include a wide breadth of wireless technologies from massive MIMO, antenna design, phased arrays, cloud RAN, fiber backhaul, mobile network testing, and communications systems.
Professor Rowell was a recipient of the 2018 Fred Ellersick Award for best original paper in IEEE Communications Society for one of the papers proposing hybrid beamforming in millimeter wave base-stations (now part of 3GPP standards). He was awarded Inventor of the Year in Rohde & Schwarz in 2018.
