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 University in Melbourne, he’s an skilled in creating antennas and radio-over-fiber communication hyperlinks.

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

She juggles her day job along with her function as director and vice chairman of IEEE Technical Activities, making her a member of the IEEE Board of Directors. She additionally chairs the Technical Activities Board, which is the most important of the group’s six main boards. Novak helps set the strategic path 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 made up my mind that I needed to do engineering somewhat than simply science,” she says. “After I began to look into the totally different fields of engineering, I spotted electrical engineering matched finest due to the topics I cherished probably 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 acquired a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1992 from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Her doctoral thesis was on the rising area of semiconductor lasers for fiber-optic communications.

“Loads of my analysis has centered on creating new applied sciences for transporting very-high-frequency wi-fi indicators over optical fiber and creating new strategies that additionally allow high-performance radio-over-fiber programs,” 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 University of California, Los Angeles, and the U.S. Naval Research 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 tools for submarines.

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

Dorsal was acquired by Corvis, an optical community tools 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 associate, 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 had been going to fund our personal firm and bootstrapped it by means of analysis grants,” Novak says. “Our background writing analysis proposals as professors really performed a very essential function in getting the corporate off the bottom.”

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

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

Giving again to the group

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

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

“IEEE is the skilled dwelling for everybody who works within the engineering area,” she says. “It’s a membership, and you have to be in it.”

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

“What folks don’t notice, notably youthful folks, 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 discuss to them about new alternatives, and we even utilized for analysis grants collectively. All these collaborations actually increase your community.”

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

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

“As a result of IEEE is a worldwide group, you additionally meet folks from around the globe with different backgrounds and talking totally different languages—which is a wonderful approach for folks to increase their horizons.

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