Norman Franchi is Professor (W3) at the Friedrich-Alexander-University (FAU) Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, where he heads the Chair of Intelligent Technical Electronics and Systems. He holds a Dr.-Ing. (Ph.D.E.E., 2015) and Dipl.-Ing. (M.S.E.E., 2007) in Electrical, Electronic and Communications Engineering (EEI), both from FAU.

From 2007 to 2011, he worked in research and development in the automotive industry as a system and application engineer for the design of advanced networked control systems. From 2012 to 2015, he was a research assistant at the Institute of Electrical Engineering at FAU, where he focused on software-defined radio-based V2X communication. From 2015 to 2021, he worked at the Vodafone Chair of Gerhard Fettweis at the Technical University of Dresden (TU Dresden), where he was research group leader for robust mobile communication systems and 5G industrial campus networks. From 2019 to 2020 he was Managing Director of 5G Lab GmbH, Germany. In 2020, he founded Advancing Individual Networks (AIN) GmbH, Germany, a technology start-up for design, optimization and operation of IIoT and 5G campus networks.

He is a member of the IEEE ISAC Initiative, the Open 6G Hub Germany, the 5G++ Lab Germany and the 6G Platform Germany. He is also an advisory board member of the Industrial Radio Lab Germany (IRLG) and the KI Park e.V., Germany.

His research interests include 6G, 5G, Joint Communications and Sensing (JC&S), robust and secure systems, industrial IoT, campus networks, Open RAN, Vehicle-2-X communications, metaverse technologies, extended reality (XR), robust energy (micro) grids, green and sustainable ICT, and IoT technologies for smart cities and smart countries.