Muhammad Zeeshan Shakir is a Senior Researcher at Carleton University, Canada where he is serving as a project manager for Carleton-Industry collaborative R&D projects and leading the Team working on SDN-driven fronthauling and Drones-based communications. Since recently, his most of the research has been sponsored by local industry partners and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). He is also serving as a Consultant for R&D at Communications Theory Lab, KAUST and responsible for providing his expertise for the development of FSO based sustainable fronthaul network for 5G communications. Previously, from July 2012 to July 2015, he was an Assistant Research Scientist at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), Qatar where he was a Co-Lead PI of 1M $ project awarded by Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) on heterogeneous networks. Prior to joining TAMUQ, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia where he received a collaborative research award from the KAUST Global Collaborative Research initiative for research project with University of Surrey. From September to December 2010, he was a Visiting Researcher at Institute for Communication Systems (ICS), University of Surrey, UK. He earned his PhD degree in electronic and electrical engineering from University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK in 2010. From January 2006 to September 2009, he was the joint recipient of an industrial research fund award and a prestigious overseas research scholarship by the University of Strathclyde.

Dr. Shakir's main research interests lie in performance analysis of diverse wireless communication networks & systems. He is particularly interested in design and deployment of heterogeneous small-cell networks with particular focus on Green communications, traffic offloading techniques and smart backhaul/fronthaul networks and emerging technologies for 5G communications such as Caching, D2D and SDN. He is also interested in deriving emerging wireless application oriented unified frameworks for machine type communications, IoT, emerging cognitive radio communications and ubiquitous remote/mobile healthcare networks. He has been also directly engaged in the development and standardization of IEEE DySPAN 1900.7 standard project "Radio Interface for White Space Dynamic Spectrum Access Radio Systems Supporting Fixed and Mobile Operation. He has published/produced more than 75 technical journal and conference papers and has contributed to 7 books, all in well reputed venues. He is co-author of 3 research monographs including one authored book on Green Heterogeneous Wireless Networks.

Dr. Shakir has been/is giving tutorials on emerging wireless communication systems at IEEE flagship conferences such as IEEE ICC 2016, Kuala Lumpur, IEEE ICUWB 2015, Montreal, IEEE GLOBECOM 2014/2015, Austin/San Diego, IEEE BlackSeaSom 2015, Constanta, Romania and IEEE ICC 2014, Sydney. He has been/is serving as Chair/Co-Chair of several special sessions/workshops and symposia in IEEE flagship conferences, such as ICC, VTC and GlobalSIP. He has been also serving on the technical program committee of different IEEE conferences, including Globecom, ICC, and WCNC. He is the founding organizer and technical Chair of IEEE Workshop Next Generation Backhaul/Fronthaul Networks - BackNets, collocated annually with IEEE ICC since 2015. BackNets has now been considered as a successful consortium of key academic and industrial players to bridge the R&D gaps in in this area. He is an Associate Technical Editor of IEEE Communications Magazine and has served as a lead Guest Editor for IEEE Communications Magazine and IEEE Wireless Communications.

Dr. Shakir is serving as a Chair of IEEE ComSoc emerging technical committee on backhaul/fronthaul communications and networking. He has been serving as an active member to several IEEE ComSoc technical committees. He has been serving as an elected Secretary to the IEEE DySPAN 1900.7 working group and the standard representative of IEEE ComSoc technical committee on Signal processing and communication electronics. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, an active member of IEEE ComSoc and IEEE Standard Association.