Dalma Novak’s Journey From Professor to Entrepreneur

One of many different founders is her husband, IEEE Fellow Rod Waterhouse. A former electrical and electronics engineering affiliate professor at RMIT College in Melbourne, he’s an knowledgeable in creating antennas and radio-over-fiber communication hyperlinks.

“We determined,” she says, “that we might kind our personal firm and work on among the applied sciences that we developed through the years as lecturers and likewise construct on among the issues that we labored on as Ph.D. college students.”

She juggles her day job together with her position as director and vp of IEEE Technical Actions, making her a member of the IEEE Board of Administrators. She additionally chairs the Technical Actions Board, which is the most important of the group’s six main boards. Novak helps set the strategic route of the TAB, which oversees IEEE’s societies and technical councils, together with their services and products.

From professor to entrepreneur

Novak, who grew up in Brisbane, Australia, fell in love with math and physics in highschool. She needed to have a STEM profession. Her non-public all-girls college within the early Eighties didn’t have a profession counselor, so she researched job prospects at her native library.

“I decided that I needed to do engineering reasonably than simply science,” she says. “After I began to look into the completely different fields of engineering, I spotted electrical engineering matched finest due to the topics I cherished essentially the most. I actually needed to say I used to be an engineer once I completed my diploma.”

She graduated in 1987 with a bachelor’s diploma in engineering, then received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1992 from the College of Queensland in Brisbane. Her doctoral thesis was on the rising subject of semiconductor lasers for fiber-optic communications.

“A variety of my analysis has targeted on growing new applied sciences for transporting very-high-frequency wi-fi alerts over optical fiber and growing new strategies that additionally allow high-performance radio-over-fiber methods,” she says.

She has revealed greater than 280 papers; most are within the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Shortly after incomes her Ph.D., she was employed by the College of Melbourne as a professor {of electrical} and digital engineering. She later was appointed as chair of telecommunications.

Novak and her husband took a six-month sabbatical from their universities in 2000 so she might conduct analysis on the College of California, Los Angeles, and the U.S. Naval Analysis Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

A number of colleagues from the Naval Analysis Lab who went on to work at startups inspired Novak and her husband to do the identical. The 2 joined Dorsal Networks in Columbia, Md. At Dorsal, which builds undersea optical networks, she developed optical networking gear for submarines.

“My husband and I had all the time needed to spend a while working within the business in the US,” she says. “We didn’t essentially see ourselves as being professors all of our lives.”

Dorsal was acquired by Corvis, an optical community gear producer in Columbia. It then bought Broadwing, a telecommunications service supplier, and took on that identify. The corporate went out of enterprise in 2003.

The couple and their enterprise companion, Austin Farnham, a former managing director at Corvis, based Octane in 2004. Farnham is president, and Waterhouse is chief expertise officer.

“We determined that we have been going to fund our personal firm and bootstrapped it via analysis grants,” Novak says. “Our background writing analysis proposals as professors really performed a very essential position in getting the corporate off the bottom.”

The corporate initially was constrained to engaged on initiatives for which they obtained funding, but it surely has developed and now not applies for analysis grants, Novak says.

“We’re very a lot targeted on commercializing our expertise and promoting our merchandise,” she says.

Giving again to the neighborhood

Novak’s Ph.D. advisor inspired her to hitch IEEE due to its journals and conferences.

“You could be part of IEEE as a result of it’s actually essential so that you can publish papers and go to its conferences,” he informed her. “And that’s what you’re going to should do with a purpose to graduate.” She joined.

“IEEE is the skilled house for everybody who works within the engineering subject,” she says. “It’s a membership, and it is advisable be in it.”

A number of the most essential advantages for her, she says, are assembly authors of seminal papers, networking, and collaborating.

“What individuals don’t notice, notably youthful individuals, is the worth of networking,” she says. “After I moved to the U.S., I already knew many individuals from attending IEEE conferences and thru my volunteer work for it. I used to be capable of speak to them about new alternatives, and we even utilized for analysis grants collectively. These kind of collaborations actually increase your community.”

She says she feels strongly about giving again to the neighborhood via volunteering. She has served in lots of roles, notably for the IEEE Photonics Society. She is a former president, vp of membership, and a member of its board of governors.

“You get a lot extra return in your funding together with your membership while you’re a volunteer,” she says. “You get to work together with actually sensible individuals and be taught from them.

“As a result of IEEE is a worldwide group, you additionally meet individuals from world wide with completely different backgrounds and talking completely different languages—which is a wonderful manner for individuals to increase their horizons.

“Volunteering is a good way to actually open your thoughts to different individuals. And I believe it simply makes you develop as an individual. Each volunteer expertise I’ve had has enriched me personally.”