ETSI is pleased to unveil its 2025 ETSI Fellows who were announced at the 85th ETSI General Assembly on 25 March. The awards ceremony took place at the Meridien hotel, located in the beautiful settings of the famous Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in the South of France. Serge Raes and Alex Leadbeater were unanimously nominated as ETSI Fellows for their outstanding personal contributions to the organization by the Awards committee, composed of the GA Chair and Vice-Chairs, the Board Chair and the ETSI Director-General.

Serge Raes devoted countless hours, effort, and financial resources to his professional career, focusing on various activities within or complementary to ETSI. In 1991, he began contributing to the TETRA standard and later served, from 1993 to 1994, as a Project Team Leader/Expert in RES6 PT29 (project coordination), PT49V (standard re-drafting and restructuring), and PT62V (conformance testing).

From 1998 to 2005, Serge played a key role in the creation and operation of the 3G Patent Platform, an innovative patent pool for licensing essential patents related to the 3GPP UMTS and LTE standards. Between 2008 and 2022, he served as a DAtabase EXpert (DAX) for the DARE (IPR DAtabase RE-structuring) project. Additionally, from 2010 to 2022, Serge was Vice‑Chair of the IPR Special Committee, for which he received a certificate recognizing “his outstanding contributions to the work of the ETSI IPR Special Committee, in particular for his dedication as Vice-Chair and for the extensive subject matter expertise he has brought to the ETSI community”.

Alex Leadbeater is a leading expert and active member of the ETSI security community, having attended his first 3GPP SA3 meeting 24 years ago. Over the years, he has chaired four ETSI/3GPP security groups in parallel and has contributed extensively to ETSI security standardization activities. Alex has provided technical expertise and support for law enforcement obligations since the advent of 3G in 3GPP and has played a key role in driving major cybersecurity standardization efforts in TC CYBER, Secure AI (SAI), and NFV. Additionally, he has led the ETSI Security Conference for several years and delivered numerous conference presentations on behalf of ETSI. Alex has also represented ETSI in EU and global regulatory cybersecurity activities and contributed to the ETSI education in standards programme. It remains an honour for him to witness the continued development of ETSI security standards, which drive advancements across a wide range of capabilities and create lasting impact and benefits for both the present and the future.

More information at: https://www.etsi.org/membership/fellows.