The RAIN Alliance has announced the election of five new members to its Board of Directors, each bringing deep expertise from across the UHF RFID value chain. The newly elected professionals will serve two-year terms through March 2028, joining four continuing board members to guide the organization’s strategy during a period of rapid RAIN RFID adoption worldwide.
The new board members represent a broad cross-section of the RAIN RFID ecosystem, spanning healthcare, retail, semiconductor design, reader technology, and standards development.
Gwen Volpe, Senior Director of Medication Technology Programs and Strategic Partnerships at Fresenius Kabi, joins the board with extensive experience in pharmaceutical RFID programmes. Her work focuses on combining RFID innovation with healthcare supply chain advancement, an area where UHF tagging is gaining significant traction for drug authentication and inventory management.
Joseph “Jos” Kunnen of Times-7 Research Limited brings more than 45 years of IT and RFID experience to the table. Known for his strategic leadership and governance expertise, Kunnen has been a long-standing figure in antenna design and reader technology development.
Le Liu, Director of Technical Standards at Qualcomm, is leading efforts around IoT standardization and smartphone integration for RAIN RFID. His inclusion on the board signals the growing importance of bringing UHF read capability into consumer mobile devices, a development that could dramatically expand the reach of RAIN RFID beyond traditional enterprise use cases.
Michael Fein serves as Director of Product Management for RAIN RFID at Zebra Technologies, where he manages a comprehensive portfolio of readers, fixed infrastructure, and handheld devices. Fein holds ten RFID-related patents and brings a strong product development perspective to the board.
Rounding out the new members is Tristan Finet from Decathlon, where he leads Programme Support and Communication. With a decade of experience managing advanced retail traceability systems, Finet represents one of the most high-profile end-user deployments of RAIN RFID in global retail. Decathlon’s item-level tagging programme has long been considered a benchmark for the industry.
Four incumbent directors will continue serving through March 2027: Abby Wu of Xindeco IoT, James Goodland from NXP Semiconductors, Juho Partanen of Impinj Inc., and Pierre Muller from EM Microelectronic. Together, the nine-member board covers chip manufacturers, reader vendors, solution providers, and major end users.
RAIN Alliance President Aileen Ryan noted that the expanded board provides a comprehensive view across the entire ecosystem, positioning the alliance to better serve its 200-strong membership as global adoption continues to accelerate. With UHF RFID deployments growing in healthcare, retail, logistics, and supply chain management, the diversity of expertise on this board should help the RAIN Alliance address the technical and commercial challenges that lie ahead.
Read more at https://therainalliance.org/rain-alliance-elects-five-industry-leaders-to-board-of-directors/