Kelvin Woods
Department Chief Engineer, Enabling Tech
Kelvin Woods is chief engineer for Enabling Tech, based at MITRE’s Fort Meade, Maryland, location. He leads telecommunications R&D, collaborating with government partners in the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community to leverage 5G/NextG’s benefits for mission-critical programs. Woods brings expertise in electrical engineering, signal processing, and wireless communications.
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My name is Kelvin Woods.
I'm a Department Chief Engineer for the Fort Meade site.
I mostly work in telecommunications and wireless communications research and development for the Department of Defense.
5G network is the fifth generation network, so wireless communications, but it's actually gonna be encompassing a bunch of other technologies.
So you look at the earlier generations, as in 3G, we were trying to connect
people to talk on the phones, 4G, we have the advent of data, and 5G is moving to try to build connectivity across everything.
When you think of these generations, they're not really actually discreet points in time.
It's more of a continuum, as 5G is just really being starting to be deployed.
Researchers are already kind of turned their thoughts towards 6G.
We're looking at how that's gonna impact government systems.
5G can help rural communities by the sheer bandwidth to do video conferencing potentially real-time, be able to have more interaction for patients and doctors or for diagnosis to actually occur in faster timeframes.
So one of MITRE's roles bringing stakeholders involved in interaction with 5G is being a trusted advisor.
So we work with various sponsors, helping them understand the security model and how 5G changes or modifies that security model.
My work supports MITRE's mission to solving problems for a safer world, and one of the people we support is the Department of Defense.
So we're looking at helping them bolster their current systems and future systems to help protect the United States.
One of the things I really like about MITRE is the ability to support many different customers across the government.
For instance, from the DOD to the Department of Homeland Security, all cross-cutting technologies, where you can focus on whatever technology you're interested in and you can use that to support multiple sponsors.
So the aspects that I found most rewarding are working on problems that don't have an apparent solution.
So causes you to have to dig into the problem, understand it, think out of the box, look for innovative solutions, and then develop new parts and components that will help make that solution possible.
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