Press
Release for

CQR
2013 CHAIRMAN’S
AWARD

The Technical
Committee on Communications Quality & Reliability
(CQR) is an IEEE Communications
Society international professional organization that is unique in its service to
the quality, reliability and security professionals of the global communications
industry. The IEEE Communications Society President

Vijay Bhargava and CQR Chair Kelly Krick, honored
Carol Davids and Nicola Palmer
with the 2013 CQR Chairman’s Award
at an awards ceremony during the annual CQR International Workshop in Marco
Island, Florida on May 15, 2013.

Criteria upon which recipients were selected include:

• sustained
  contributions in the field of Quality, Reliability & Security of
  communications services, networks or systems;

• a demonstration of the core value
  of a professional society- adding value to others; and

• integrity consistent with
  that of a role model.

2013
AWARD RECIPIENTS

Carol Davids,

Illinois Institute of
Technology (IIT),
USA

For contributions in telecommunications quality and reliability and advancing
education

Carol
Davids is the Director of the Real-Time Communications (RTC) Lab at the
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and an Industry Professor in IIT’s School
of Applied Technology. She designed and built the RTC Lab and developed the
curriculum for the communications courses that use its facilities. She has
initiated numerous lab-based projects to develop original real-time
communications applications and systems, as well as to study the performance,
interoperability and characteristic behaviors of such systems.

Before
joining the staff and faculty at IIT, Carol worked in the telecommunications
industry for over thirty years, starting in the Bell System and moving into the
vendor and standards development communities at Motorola, Tellabs, CableLabs
Packet Cable, The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF.) Her standards work includes: IETF
drafts RFCs, SIP benchmarking methodology and terminology; Membership in
Specialist Task Forces at ETSI for the specification of call signaling and
lawful intercept functions on packet-based cable networks; Co-authorship of the
PacketCable, CableLabs standards for Voice over IP network elements on cable
networks.

Carol
earned her BS in Engineering Mathematics from Columbia University, School of
Engineering and Applied Science, New York, N.Y. and her MS in Information
Technology from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL.

Nicola Palmer, Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, Verizon Wireless

For leadership in implementing LTE and addressing the challenges of reliable
wireless voice and data performance

Nicola (Nicki) Palmer is vice president and chief technical officer for Verizon
Wireless, the largest wireless company in the United States, with responsibility
for planning, engineering, building and operating Verizon Wireless’
industry-leading voice and data networks, including its growing 4G LTE network.
A premier technology company, Verizon Wireless operates the nation’s largest 4G
LTE network.

Prior to her current role, Palmer was senior vice president of Global Network
Operations and Engineering at Verizon, responsible for planning, designing and
operations of the company’s global voice, data and IP networks, which span more
than 2,600 cities in 150 countries on six continents. In that role, she also
led the engineering and operations of the fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network,
which enables Verizon’s FiOS data and TV services.

She
has served as vice president of Network for Verizon Wireless, overseeing design
and deployment of the 4G LTE network with responsibility for network
performance, quality assurance, product and service rollouts and regulatory
compliance. She also served as vice president of Video Services at Verizon,
responsible for overall program management and performance assurance.

Palmer began her career at Bell Atlantic in 1990 and has held a number of
leadership positions in engineering, operations, and project and service
management supporting advanced data and IP products.

She
earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Penn State University
and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School.