Maria Luisa Merani

Dipartimento di Ingegneria "Enzo Ferrari"

Via Vivarelli 10, 41125 Modena, Italy

e-mail: marialuisa.merani@unimore.it   tel: +39 059 2056166

Maria Luisa Merani received both the M.Sc. (summa cum laude) and the Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy. In 1991, she spent one year at the Computer Science Department of the University of California in Los Angeles. Since 1993, she has been a faculty member of the Engineering Department "Enzo Ferrari'' at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (UniMORE), Italy, where she is an associate professor in telecommunications. During her academic career, she has successfully tutored dozens of students for their master's degree thesis, as well as four PhDs. On October 2023, one of them won the national academic award for the best doctoral thesis in communications. Currently, she is tutoring three PhD students. Her research interests lie in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) field,  with emphasis on the safety of vulnerable road users and the adoption of machine learning to vehicular communications.  In the past, she worked on Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) techniques, peer-to-peer architectures for video streaming, and cellular mobile radio systems. She is the representative of the research unit of UniMORE inside CNIT, the Italian National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications. M.L. Merani served as the technical program co-chair for the 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS) 2005  and for IEEE Globecom, 2007 and 2009 editions. In 2010, she  was the general chair of the sixth IEEE International Wireless Pervasive Computing Conference (ISWPC). In October 2009, Cambridge University Press published her textbook ``Hands on networking: from theory to practice''. In 2012, she coordinated the Erasmus+ Intensive Programme for PhD students ``Multimedia and the Future Internet: Moving Social and Mobile''. In the same year, she won the 2012 edition of the BMW App Games with one of her students. She served as an associate editor in the board of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications over the years 2008-2014. In 2018, she coordinated the experimental project ``Dynamic, Energy-AwaRe PaTh Selection in Hybrid Wireless SeTtings (DART-HIT)'' and in 2020, the experimental project “eXploiting multi-radio access Technologies for emeRgency communicAtions in vehiCulAr enviRonmentS (XTRA-CARS)”, both funded within the H2020 framework. ln 2020, she was the co-winner with R. Amoroso and F. Esposito of the Best Poster Award at the International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies, ACM CoNext. In 2025, she will be the general co-chair of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), one of the flagship conferences in the field of communications. M.L.Merani is an IEEE Senior Member.