Paul Hartmann is President of RF SAW Inc. (https://rfsaw.com/) He has over 40 years of experience in designing various RF  electronic products that are now widely used in many communications networks. Prior to joining RF SAW, Paul served as the founding Vice President of Engineering and CTO of Applied Digital Access (ADA) in San Diego. Prior to that, he worked at Collins Radio/Rockwell International at Richardson, TX where in the mid-1970s, he led the design team that developed the first successful digital microwave system developed in the United States.  Paul Hartmann holds B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and M.S. in Management and Administrative Science from the University of Texas at Dallas. He has 15 patents and authored numerous technical papers and magazine articles in IEEE and trade publications.  Paul was deeply involved with the IEEE Communications Society, serving on its Board of Governors and in various chair roles for ICC and GLOBECOM conferences.  He then became the founding chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on RFID.

Merrily Hartmann retired from SBC Communications, Inc. (formerly Southwestern Bell and now AT&T) in 2000 with 25 years of service.  She worked there in various roles, from equipment engineering and network planning to business and sales. At retirement, she was Executive Director of Global Markets Sales Support, managing all sales operations for SBC’s largest customers.  Prior to that, she worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Indian Hill – Naperville, IL) as a Senior Technical Aide and was involved in 1AESS Processor Project. Merrily received her B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Merrily has an extraordinary record of service as a volunteer conference organizer with the IEEE Communications Society where she served on its Board of Governors as Director of Conference Operations. She applied all her experience and talent in that area to the IEEE RFID conference series and tirelessly trained the young, inexperienced, and emerging volunteer engineers to run the conference including the financial aspects.

Paul and Merrily Hartmann both stood at the very origin of IEEE RFID conference series. They served  in various executive and chair roles for it, starting from the very first conference which took place in 2007 in Grapevine, TX and on for several subsequent years. They also were at the origin of creation of the IEEE Technical Committee on RFID that eventually evolved into the IEEE Council on RFID. Organizational and visionary abilities of Paul and Merrily Hartmann coupled with their energy and enthusiasm contributed to the success of the general IEEE RFID community and IEEE council on RFID that we observe today. Thanks to their early hard work, IEEE RFID conference became a highly respected, widely recognizable technical conference that attracts large numbers of attendees from both academia and industry.