Anna Tzanakaki is an Associate Professor at the Physics Department for the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece and a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK. Previously she was an Associate Professor at the Athens Information Technology (AIT), Greece where she was leading the Network Design and Services (NDS) research group. She has been also an adjunct faculty member of the Information Networking Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, USA. She has obtained a BSc degree from the University of Crete, Greece, an MSc and a PhD both from the University of Essex, UK. She was a Senior Research Officer and also a visiting lecturer at the department of Electronics Systems Engineering at the University of Essex. She was a co-founder of ilotron ltd, a high-technology spin-off from the University of Essex. Following ilotron, Dr Tzanakaki joined Altamar Networks, a subsidiary of Ditech Communications, as a principal engineer responsible for optical architecture and system design. She is a co-author of over 200 publications in international journals and conferences. She is a co-inventor of several granted and published patents. She is a senior member of the IEEE and several Technical Program Committees of international scientific conferences. She has served as an associate editor of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networks and is a technical referee for various conferences as well as international scientific journals. She serves and has served as a technical expert for the EU, the national research councils of Greece, UK and Portugal. She has actively participated in a number of European and national funded research collaborative projects and is the technical coordinator of the EU 5G PPP project 5G-VICTORI. Her research interests include converged systems and networks.