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 professional 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 teachers and in addition construct on a number of the issues that we labored on as Ph.D. college students.”

She juggles her day job together with her function 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 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.

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 personal all-girls college within the early Nineteen 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 liked probably the most. I actually needed 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 acquired a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1992 from the College of Queensland in Brisbane. Her doctoral thesis was on the rising area of semiconductor lasers for fiber-optic communications.

“A variety of 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 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 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 tools for submarines.

“My husband and I had at all times needed 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.”

Dorsal was acquired by Corvis, an optical community tools 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 accomplice, Austin Farnham, a former managing director at Corvis, based Octane in 2004. Farnham is president, and Waterhouse is chief know-how officer.

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

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

“We’re very a lot centered on commercializing our know-how 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 should 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 need to do in an effort to graduate.” She joined.

“IEEE is the skilled dwelling for everybody who works within the engineering area,” she says. “It’s a membership, and it’s good 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 understand, 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. All these collaborations actually increase your community.”

She says she feels strongly about giving again to the neighborhood by 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 along with your membership whenever you’re a volunteer,” she says. “You get to work together with actually sensible individuals and study from them.

“As a result of IEEE is a worldwide group, you additionally meet individuals from world wide with totally different backgrounds and talking totally different languages—which is a superb method 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.”