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’d kind our personal firm and work on a number of the applied sciences that we developed through the years as lecturers and in addition 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 biggest 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 wished to have a STEM profession. Her non-public all-girls faculty within the early Eighties didn’t have a profession counselor, so she researched job prospects at her native library.

“I decided that I wished to do engineering quite than simply science,” she says. “Once I began to look into the completely different fields of engineering, I spotted electrical engineering matched finest due to the themes I beloved essentially the most. I actually wished 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 bought a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1992 from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Her doctoral thesis was on the rising discipline of semiconductor lasers for fiber-optic communications.

“Numerous my analysis has centered 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 techniques,” she says.

She has printed 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 may 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 gear for submarines.

“My husband and I had at all times wished 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 title. 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 had been going to fund our personal firm and bootstrapped it by way 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 tasks for which they obtained 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 worthwhile 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 informed her. “And that’s what you’re going to should do with a view to graduate.” She joined.

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

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

“What individuals don’t notice, significantly youthful individuals, is the worth of networking,” she says. “Once 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. Most of these collaborations actually increase your community.”

She says she feels strongly about giving again to the group by way of volunteering. She has served in lots of roles, significantly 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 along with your membership if you’re a volunteer,” she says. “You get to work together with actually good individuals and study from them.

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

“Volunteering is a good way to essentially 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.”