Mike Jacobs has over 35 years experience in the telecommunications and defense industries and currently leads a portfolio of RF systems engineering work at Booz Allen. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College and Pennsylvania State University, respectively. He started out at the top, climbing telephone poles for Bell of Pennsylvania while working on his undergraduate degree at night. He took on increasing engineering and management responsibility before moving on to Penn State for graduate studies focusing on antennas, electromagnetics, and radio propagation. In partnership with his graduate adviser and investors he began a successful startup focused on bringing advanced Computational Electromagnetics techniques to innovative antenna and RF system designs and developed the antenna system for the Army’s tactical radio communications relay payload for the Shadow UAV as well as early research into cognitive radio and SDR systems, along with antennas for radio and radar astronomy at the Arecibo Observatory. For the past 16 years, Mike has served as an RF Subject Matter Expert first for Aeronautical Radio, Incorporated (ARINC) which was then acquired in part by Booz Allen Hamilton where he now leads the RF Systems and Computational Electromagnetics labs supporting wireless technology across Booz Allen’s full range of government clients. His specific expertise is in spectrum engineering; antennas; tactical, aviation, and HF communications; and most recently meeting the growing demand for advanced 5G and 6G technology within DoD and the need for innovative spectrum sharing solutions.