I’m Maria Cuevas and I’m Principal Manager for the Mobility Theme in Applied Research.
Who are you and what do you do?
Tell us about your background
I received a 5 year engineering degree in telecommunications in Seville. I also spent a year at Swansea University in Wales to pursue my MSc. As part of my MSc degree with Swansea University, I did an industry placement with BT in Ipswich. I finished my degree and was offered a permanent job at BT, and I’ve been here ever since!
What are your career ambitions and passions?
In the mid 90’s when I had to choose a degree, you could tell that mobile communications were very exciting with loads of new opportunities. I was interested in technology and needed to choose which area to focus on. The opportunities from telecommunications were instantly appealing to me and it’s continued to capture my interest more and more. My main focus is on the impact that technology can have on people’s lives. How we can all remain connected, especially during current times of crisis, and also how technology can ease people’s lives but personally and professionally, hopefully making us all more efficient and freeing up more time to do all the other things that we love.
Tell us about a project you’re currently working on
We’re progressing research to look at how to bring technology to people. There are lots of amazing opportunities that our business can provide value to such as healthcare and the connected ambulance use case. The use cases are the exciting bit of the work for the public, but my work centres around the question of what technologies do we need. My team is very much network technologies focussed. We look at what capabilities we can expect in the future and how standards are being developed to find opportunities for 2, 3, 4 years into the future. We also explore a wider range of use cases including entertainment, augmented and virtual reality, gaming, drone control, industrial automation, and even connected vehicles.
