Predicting the future for technology and innovation.

As President of Nokia Bell Labs and Chief Technology Officer, Marcus Weldon is responsible for coordinating the technical strategy across the company and driving technological and architectural innovations into the portfolio.

Marcus is considered one of the luminaries in our industry in terms of the clarity, depth and breadth of his vision, and his track of picking the right technological disruptions and opportunities, from vectoring for copper access, to the evolution to LTE overlay and Small Cells, to the emergence of virtualization and SDN as profound industry changing forces and the movement towards edge cloud architectures. He combines this vision with the power of Bell Labs, to create a unique innovation engine whose goal is to ‘invent the future’ of the networking and communications industry.

Commenting on this joint role, Marcus said: “We are in a unique period in human history where we are on the verge of a new technological revolution defined by the digitization and connection of everything and everyone. This will require 100-fold or more improvement in network scale, flexibility, programmability and cost per bit. And in order to achieve these goals, the cloud will merge with and move to the edge of the network, and device functionality will similarly be increasingly be implemented in this ‘cloud integrated network’. These types of big networking challenges are quintessential ‘Bell Labs challenges’ and we are rising to meet them as we have for the better part of 90 years by fundamental technological breakthroughs that have the potential to be 10 times better than those available today in any key dimension.”

Marcus holds a B.S in Chemistry and Computer Science from King’s College, London, and a Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry from Harvard University. In 1995, he joined the Physics Division at AT&T Bell Labs as a post-doctoral researcher, before becoming a Member of Technical Staff in the Optical Materials Division. He won a series of scientific and engineering society awards for his work on electronic and optical materials. He was selected as one of the Global Telecoms Business Power 100 of the most influential people in ICT in 2014 and one of their ‘Top CTOs to watch in 2015’. He was a member of the Executive Board of ATIS (Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions) and a member of the former FCC Open Internet Advisory Committee. He is on the Board of Trustees of the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey and an advisor to select Venture Funds. He is the editor of the recent book “The Future X Network: A Bell Labs Perspective” (Taylor and Francis, 2015).