Nidhi Simmons is a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at the Centre for Wireless Innovation, Queen’s University Belfast.  Her research focusses on delivering ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) within 5G and 5G+ networks. It is hoped that this technology will contribute to the widespread adoption of delay sensitive applications such as autonomous driving and industry automation.

She received the B.E. degree (Hons.) in Telecommunications Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belgaum, India, in 2011, the M.Sc. degree (Hons.) in Wireless Communications and Signal Processing from the University of Bristol, U.K., in 2012. Through funding from the Queen’s University Belfast studentship, she completed her PhD in Electrical Engineering in December 2018. From January 2019 until August 2020 she worked as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Wireless innovation, Queen's University Belfast. Her research mainly focussed on Wireless Channel Characterization and Modelling. During this time she also single-handedly devised a new framework for realising URLLC in future wireless networks such as 6G. To secure funding for this research and build her own lab, she recently attracted a five-year research fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering worth £500k. She has authored 9 IEEE journals and letters, and 9 IEEE conference papers. She is also a reviewer for several IEEE transactions and letters, and a member of the IEEE and Women in Engineering.

Aside from her academic accomplishments, Nidhi is deeply involved with promoting Women in Engineering and STEM. She has regularly taken part in open days and PhD induction events at QUB where she has actively promoted engineering.  In a series of events organised at the ECIT institute, she has delivered talks to 80+ school children (mainly females; when they were about to make their GCSE choices) where she has encouraged them to take up STEM subjects by discussing her own experience, motivation, and the challenges she has overcome. She also sponsors a young girl in Nepal because she strongly believes in giving girls an equal chance to receive an eduation. She hopes to be a role model to her and other female students, and inspire them to take up STEM subjects and engineering. 

Her research interests include physical-layer security, channel characterization and modeling, cellular device-to-device, body-centric communications, ultra-reliable low-latency communications and machine-learning.