Operating at the edge between industry and academia

Sonia Heemstra de Groot studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Mar del Plata in Argentina and later earned a Ph.D. degree at the University of Twente. Currently she holds the position of chief scientist at the Twente Institute for Wireless and Mobile Communications of which she is one of the co-founders. In addition, she is associate professor for one day per week at the Faculty of EEMCS, University of Twente, in the area of mobile and wireless communications.

In her career she has worked on many different topics at the university and in the industry. During her presentation she will talk about her academic and industrial experiences as researcher, lecturer, project leader and entrepreneur.



Sonia Heemstra de Groot received a M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Mar del Plata National University, Argentina, a second M.Sc. degree from Netherlands University Federation For International Cooperation (NUFFIC), a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Twente, The Netherlands.

From 1991 to 1998 she was a lecturer in the Tele-Informatics and Open Systems group of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Twente. Since 1999 she is an associate professor in the area of wireless networking at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) of the same university. In 2001 she joined the Wireless Multimedia Research Group at Ericsson EuroLab Netherlands (ELN).

Since 2003 she holds the position of chief scientist at the Twente Institute of Wireless and Mobile Communications, of which she is one of the co-founders.


She has participated in many national and international projects. She has been project manager of a recently competed Dutch project on 4th generation mobile networks. Currently she is involved in various Dutch and European projects on different issues in future wireless and mobile systems, including the EU IST6FP project MAGNET, and the Dutch projects PNP2008, Awareness, Easy Wireless and QoS in PN@home.

Her present research activities include radio access, future wireless and mobile networks, personal and ad-hoc networks, 4G systems and wireless security. She is a member of the IFIP TC-6 Working Group on Personal Wireless Communication.