Leadership Team
Joe Thome
CEO
Joe Thome serves as Chief Executive Officer leading AirHop’s strategic initiatives, business operations, marketing and business development activities. He brings extensive leadership experience in building innovative technology companies. Joe has championed AirHop’s product strategy, industry partnerships and business initiative for more than a decade. Prior to AirHop, he held senior leadership roles in business development and marketing for a digital RF transceiver ICs startup and for Texas Instruments across a variety of cellular UE modem solutions including CDMA2000, WiMAX, TD-SCDMA and UMTS. Joe was a co-founder of Dot Wireless, a CDMA2000 modem IC company, serving as CFO from inception through its acquisition by TI. He has also held various marketing and engineering roles for NextWave Telecom and Motorola. He holds a BSEE from the University of Iowa, a MSEE from National Technological University, and an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA.
Yan Hui
Founder and Chief Technical Advisor
Yan Hui is the founder of AirHop Communications and served as its CEO from the inception until December 2023. He now serves as Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Advisor. His vision and insight into technological trends led him to recognize early that the future of the wireless industry would be shaped by software and network automation. AirHop has achieved several significant industry firsts under Yan’s leadership, including commercialization of real-time Self-Organized Network (SON) and deployment of AI/Machine Learning RAN optimization use cases in a real network. He led AirHop’s transformation from a three-person founding team to a dynamic and thriving operational software solution company. Yan has 20 years of wireless communications industry experience in technology and product development, corporate strategy and operations, product marketing and business development. Prior to AirHop, he established and managed 3G advanced R&D organization at Texas Instruments, developing innovative core system IPs for 3G wireless products. Yan also chaired the TI wireless patent committee and led the company’s wireless standardization activities. Yan held various management and engineering positions at Nortel Networks, Dot Wireless and served on the advisory board for ECE Department at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has more than 30 patents granted or pending and a number of IEEE publications. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Tianjin University, China and a MSEE degree from UW – Madison.
Bijan Golkar
VP Engineering
Bijan Golkar serves as the Vice President of Engineering, leading AirHop’s R&D organization in product development, product commercialization, and technical support during customer engagements. Drawing upon his academic research in wireless communications, with a specific focus on coordinated resource allocation and inter-cell interference management in heterogeneous Radio Access Networks (RAN). Dr. Golkar has played a pivotal role and has made significant contributions to AirHop’s technological advancements and product development. Over his decade-long tenure at AirHop, Dr. Golkar has held diverse engineering and management roles. He has overseen the design of system architectures, algorithms and AI/ML platforms for a broad portfolio of non- and near-real-time eSON solutions, as well as O-RAN compliant Auptim xApps and rApps. Additionally, Dr. Golkar has been an active participant and contributor in industry organizations including the Small Cell Forum, Telcom Infra Project (TIP), and the O-RAN Alliance. Dr. Golkar has published academic papers in numerous journals and conference proceedings, co-authored several industry technical papers and holds a number of granted and pending patents. He earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto.
