Dimitra Simeonidou

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Dimitra E. Simeonidou FREng is a professor of High Performance Networks at the University of Bristol and a member of the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors. Her work focuses on fast telecommunications networks, including 5G, and on smart city infrastructures.

She studied engineering at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, earning a bachelor’s in 1987 and a master’s in 1989, before earning a PhD from the University of Essex in 1994. After her PhD, she spent four years at Alcatel Submarine Networks as Chief Engineer, where she helped introduce wavelength-division multiplexing networks. She returned to Essex in 1998 to establish the High Performance Network group.

In 2012 she became a Professor at the University of Bristol, directing the Smart Internet Lab and the High-Performance Networks group. She led Bristol’s efforts to become a 5G testbed, designing a compact 5G device to keep connectivity on the move and running the city’s 5G urban pilots and related UK test-network experiments. She is the chief technology officer of the Bristol is Open project, a collaboration between Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol to test future communication technologies. She was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship to advance these technologies and founded two spin-off companies: Ilotron (acquired by Altamar in 2001) and Zeetta Networks, which provides software-defined networking platforms.

Her research includes exploring quantum cryptography to protect 5G networks. In 2018 she advised the UK government on the Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review. She became head of the University of Bristol Digital Futures Institute in 2019. That year she was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and IEEE for contributions to optical networking systems and applications. In the 2025 Special Honours, she was awarded an Honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to communications technologies research and scientific policy.