It may be a little bit of a bumpy highway from leaving a safe job in academia to launching a startup primarily based in your analysis. That’s what IEEE Fellow Dalma Novak skilled. An knowledgeable in creating expertise to transmit microwave and millimeter-wave indicators over lengthy distances utilizing optical fibers, she left a tenured place on the College of Melbournein Parkville, Australia, to affix a venture-backed U.S. optical community tools agency. After two years, the startup went out of enterprise because the telecom business’s bubble was bursting within the early 2000s.
That flip of occasions didn’t dissuade Novak. She cherished working in business and had no intention of returning to academia, she says. As an alternative, she helped discovered Pharad, now Octane Wi-fiwhich makes superior antennas and radio-over-fiber merchandise for communications tools. Situated in Hanover, Md., Novak is vice chairman of engineering for Octane.
Dalma Novak
Employer:
Octane Wi-fi in Hanover, Md.
Title:
Vp of engineering
Member grade:
Fellow
Alma mater:
College of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
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 in addition construct on among the issues that we labored on as Ph.D. college students.”
She juggles her day job along with her position as director and vice chairman of IEEE Technical Actionsmaking her a member of the IEEE Board of Administrators. She additionally chairs the Technical Actions Boardwhich 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 wished to have a STEM profession. Her non-public all-girls college within the early Nineteen Eighties didn’t have a profession counselor, so she researched job potentialities at her native library.
“I decided that I wished to do engineering slightly than simply science,” she says. “Once I began to look into the completely different fields of engineering, I noticed electrical engineering matched greatest due to the topics I cherished probably the most. I actually wished to say I used to be an engineer after 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 discipline of semiconductor lasers for fiber-optic communications.
“A variety 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 methods,” 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 might conduct analysis on the College of California, Los Angelesand 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 tools for submarines.
“My husband and I had all the time wished to spend a while working within the business in america,” she says. “We didn’t essentially see ourselves as being professors all of our lives.”
“IEEE is the skilled residence for everybody who works within the engineering discipline. It’s a membership, and it’s worthwhile to be in it.”
Dorsal was acquired by Corvisan optical community tools producer in Columbia. It then bought Broadwinga telecommunications service supplier, and took on that title. The corporate went out of enterprise in 2003.
The couple and their enterprise companion, Austin Farnhama 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 via analysis grants,” Novak says. “Our background writing analysis proposals as professors truly performed a extremely necessary 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 advanced and now 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 neighborhood
Novak’s Ph.D. advisor inspired her to affix IEEE due to its journals and conferences.
“It’s worthwhile to be a part of IEEE as a result of it’s actually necessary so that you can publish papers and go to its conferences,” he advised her. “And that’s what you’re going to must do so as to graduate.” She joined.
“IEEE is the skilled residence for everybody who works within the engineering discipline,” she says. “It’s a membership, and it’s worthwhile to be in it.”
A number of the most necessary advantages for her, she says, are assembly authors of seminal papers, networking, and collaborating.
“What individuals don’t understand, notably 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 in a position to discuss to them about new alternatives, and we even utilized for analysis grants collectively. These kind of collaborations actually broaden 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, 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 whenever 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 worldwide group, you additionally meet individuals from all over the world with completely different backgrounds and talking completely different languages—which is a wonderful method for individuals to broaden their horizons.
“Volunteering is an effective way to essentially open your thoughts to different individuals. And I feel it simply makes you develop as an individual. Each volunteer expertise I’ve had has enriched me personally.”
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