Brian Classon (President of Classon Consulting, IEEE Fellow) was born and raised in the Washington D.C. area of the USA. He graduated from the University of Maryland at College Park and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has focused on communications engineering throughout his career. He worked 13 years with Motorola Labs, researching topics such as channel coding, AMC/HARQ, frame structure, control channels, reference signals, URLLC, and bandwidth-reduced low-complexity devices. After serving as the Motorola Labs global lead for LTE in RAN1, Brian took the role as Huawei RAN1 head of delegation and chief delegate. In his 11 years consulting for Huawei, he directed the submission of more than 10,000 contributions to 3GPP RAN1. Since July 2019 he has served as RAN1 lead and RAN co-lead for FUTUREWEI. Over his career, Brian has impacted many commercial systems (EDGE, 1xEV-DO/DV, WiMAX, HSPA, LTE, NR) through innovative research and academic publication, and active attendance and participation in industry standards (3GPP2, 802.16, and 3GPP). Brian contributed to the initial HSPA proposal in 2000, and has attended RAN1 continuously since the start of LTE. He has chaired sessions in RAN1 on multiple topics, including completing the initial release of NB-IoT in April 2016. Brian is the current editor for the LTE core specification 3GPP TS 36.212 and the recipient of the 2014 3GPP excellence award.