It can be a bit of a bumpy road from leaving a secure job in academia to launching a startup based on your research. That’s what IEEE Fellow Dalma Novak skilled. An skilled in growing expertise to transmit microwave and millimeter-wave indicators over lengthy distances utilizing optical fibers, she left a tenured place on the University of Melbourne, in Parkville, Australia, to affix a venture-backed U.S. optical community gear agency. After two years, the startup went out of enterprise because the telecom trade’s bubble was bursting within the early 2000s.
That flip of occasions didn’t dissuade Novak. She liked working in trade and had no intention of returning to academia, she says. As a substitute, she helped discovered Pharad, now Octane Wireless, which makes superior antennas and radio-over-fiber merchandise for communications gear. Positioned 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 University in Melbourne, he’s an skilled in creating antennas and radio-over-fiber communication hyperlinks.
“We determined,” she says, “that we’d type our personal firm and work on a few of the applied sciences that we developed through the years as lecturers and likewise construct on a few of 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 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 path 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 wished 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 potentialities at her native library.
“I decided that I wished to do engineering somewhat than simply science,” she says. “Once I began to look into the totally different fields of engineering, I noticed electrical engineering matched greatest due to the themes I liked 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 University of Queensland in Brisbane. Her doctoral thesis was on the rising subject of semiconductor lasers for fiber-optic communications.
“Loads of my analysis has centered on growing new applied sciences for transporting very-high-frequency wi-fi indicators 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 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 gear for submarines.
“My husband and I had all the time wished to spend a while working within the trade in the US,” she says. “We didn’t essentially see ourselves as being professors all of our lives.”
“IEEE is the skilled house for everybody who works within the engineering subject. It’s a membership, and you should be in it.”
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 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 truly performed a extremely vital position in getting the corporate off the bottom.”
The corporate initially was constrained to engaged on tasks for which they obtained funding, nevertheless it 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.
“You’ll want to be part of IEEE as a result of it’s actually vital 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 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 you should be in it.”
A few of the most vital 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. “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 speak to them about new alternatives, and we even utilized for analysis grants collectively. All these collaborations actually develop your community.”
She says she feels strongly about giving again to the neighborhood by way 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 once you’re a volunteer,” she says. “You get to work together with actually sensible folks and be taught from them.
“As a result of IEEE is a world group, you additionally meet folks from around the globe with different backgrounds and talking totally different languages—which is a superb method for folks to develop their horizons.
“Volunteering is an effective way to essentially 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.”
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