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Honoring the 2025 Bell Labs Fellows

by Peter Vetter, Thierry E. Klein
3 Dec 2025
2025 Bell labs fellows

The Nokia Bell Labs Fellow Award is Nokia’s highest lifetime achievement award for research and development. This extraordinary honor is a unique designation that caps a career of accomplishments in the technical community with a demonstrated impact on industry and society.

Only a small number of employees are selected each year. It is an award reserved only for individuals who, over the span of their careers, have made outstanding and sustained contributions to Nokia’s technology leadership and the communications industry at large. They are pioneers who have shaped their fields and who inspire our technical community to strive for excellence.

The Nokia Bell Labs Fellow Award is an important tradition that is also one of the longest running fellowship programs in the industry. Since its inception in 1982, only 358 people have received this prestigious award.  

The newest six Bell Labs Fellows in the 2025 class were announced on Tuesday, Nov. 25. A ceremony in their honor awaits, in which the Fellows will be introduced by their nominators and be presented with a personal plaque and monetary award.

We are excited to share that the newest Bell Labs Fellows are the following researchers and engineers.  

 

Antti Eronen from Technology Standards, Tampere, Finland:

Antti is honored for his innovations and technology creation in audio and multimedia processing which have had a significant impact in standardization and Nokia products. His career highlights include contributions to Nokia’s smartphone and virtual reality products. His research includes 636 granted patents in over 180 active families, and he has been recognized multiple times as a top Nokia inventor.

Karri Ranta-aho from Technology Standards, Espoo, Finland:

Karri is honored for pioneering physical layer innovations, mobile communication advancing global radio standards through technical leadership, industry collaboration, and transformative wireless system design. He holds more than 80 patents, many of which have been declared as standard essential for 3GPP specifications, and he’s the recipient of multiple Nokia Inventor of the Year awards.

Petri Jäppilä from Mobile Networks, Espoo, Finland:

Petri is honored for pioneering and consistently advancing ground-breaking innovations in the development of next-generation AirScale and Cloud RAN base station products and shaping the future of communication technology. In nearly 30 years at Nokia, he has been a technical leader and expert in various positions shaping 3G, 4G, 5G, 6G, RAN and Wi-Fi products.

Mark Smallwood from Network Infrastructure, Uxbridge, UK:

Mark is honored for his fundamental IP contributions to ASIC design and architecture of the FP network processor, and for redefining the world of silicon routing. Over a 25-year career, he has undertaken truly pioneering work and shown an unshakeable commitment to customer-focused innovation. He has made essential contributions in critical areas such as packaging, traffic management, memory design and queuing.

Dora van Veen from Bell Labs Core Research, Murray Hill, NJ, USA:

Dora is recognized for outstanding and sustained research into feasibility and commercialization of ultra-broadband technologies for low-cost passive optical networks. Over more than two decades, she has pushed the boundaries of fiber access networks, helping service providers deliver faster, more reliable connectivity to homes and businesses. Her work has guided industry standards, enabled smooth technology upgrades for customers, and supported Nokia’s market leadership.  

Lisa Zhang from Bell Labs Solutions Research, Murray Hill, NJ, USA:

Lisa is honored for sustained and transformational contributions to network optimization and service automation. She has spent decades turning complex network problems into practical, scalable solutions that make networks faster, more reliable, and easier to operate. She helped create core planning tools that moved engineering from manual spreadsheets to smart, automated designs, and her impact has been recognized with 23 patents and more than 100 publications.

 

Please join us in congratulating all the 2025 Bell Labs Fellows on their outstanding achievements. 

Peter Vetter

About Peter Vetter

Peter Vetter is President of Bell Labs Core Research and Bell Labs Fellow. He leads an eminent global research organization with the mission to create game changing innovations that define the future of networks and insure portfolio leadership for Nokia’s core business. He is also Honorary Professor at KULeuven and IEEE Fellow.

Thierry E. Klein

About Thierry E. Klein

Thierry E. Klein is the President of Bell Labs Solutions Research at Nokia. His global multi-disciplinary team conducts fundamental and applied research focused on new Nokia value chains, business opportunities and ecosystems. Bell Labs Solutions Research pursues research and innovation into advanced technologies, architectures, systems and applications beyond Nokia’s current product and solutions portfolio, including research into advanced sensing technologies, AI-based knowledge systems and fundamental algorithms, autonomous software and data systems, and integrated solutions and experiences.

Prior to his appointment as President of Bell Labs Solutions Research, Thierry was the Head of the Integrated Solutions and Experiences Research Lab at Nokia Bell Labs, leading a global research team dedicated to applied research, innovation and advanced technologies with the mission to design, develop and prototype massively disruptive solutions, systems and experiences for the next human-industrial revolution. The research domains span new wearable devices, cloud robotics and drones, image and data analytics, industrial process optimization and automation enabled by 5G networking and edge computing technologies.

Previously, he was the Head of Innovation Management for Vertical Industries with a focus on the transportation, automotive and connected industries sectors. He also served as the Founding Vice-Chair of the Board of the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA), a cross-industry association bringing together the telecommunications and automotive industries that he helped found and launch in September 2016. He was also the Program Leader for the Network Energy Research Program at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent with the mission to conduct research towards the design, development and use of sustainable future communications and data networks. He served as the Chairman of the Technical Committee of GreenTouch, a global consortium dedicated to improve energy efficiency in networks by a factor 1000x compared to 2010 levels.

He joined Bell Labs Research in Murray Hill, New Jersey in 2001 and his initial research was focused on next-generation wireless and wireline networks, network architectures, algorithms and protocols, network management, optimization and control. From 2006 to 2010 he served as the Founder and CTO of an internal start-up focused on wireless communications for emergency response and disaster recovery situations within Alcatel-Lucent Ventures.

Thierry earned an MS in Mechanical Engineering and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the Université de Nantes and the Ecole Centrale de Nantes in Nantes, France. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He is an author on over 35 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications and an inventor on 36 patent applications. He is the recipient of a Bell Labs’ President Award and two Bell Labs Teamwork Awards. In 2010, he was voted “Technologist of the Year” at the Total Telecom World Vendor Awards and received the 2016 Industrial Innovation Award from the IEEE Communications Society.

Thierry has dual US and Luxembourg citizenship and speaks four languages. He lives in Fanwood, New Jersey with his wife and son.