Dalma Novak’s Journey From Professor To Entrepreneur

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 experienced. An expert in developing technology to transmit microwave and millimeter-wave signals over long distances using optical fibers, she left a tenured position at the University of Melbourne, in Parkville, Australia, to join a venture-backed U.S. optical network equipment firm. After two years, the startup went out of business as the telecom industry’s bubble was bursting in the early 2000s.

That turn of events didn’t dissuade Novak. She loved working in industry and had no intention of returning to academia, she says. Instead, she helped found Pharad, now Octane Wireless, which makes advanced antennas and radio-over-fiber products for communications equipment. Located in Hanover, Md., Novak is vice president of engineering for Octane.

Dalma Novak

Employer:

Octane Wireless in Hanover, Md.

Title:

Vice president of engineering

Member grade:

Fellow

Alma mater:

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

One of the other founders is her husband, IEEE Fellow Rod Waterhouse. A former electrical and electronics engineering associate professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, he is an expert in creating antennas and radio-over-fiber communication links.

“We decided,” she says, “that we would form our own company and work on some of the technologies that we developed over the years as academics and also build on some of the things that we worked on as Ph.D. students.”

She juggles her day job with her role as director and vice president of IEEE Technical Activities, making her a member of the IEEE Board of Directors. She also chairs the Technical Activities Board, which is the largest of the organization’s six major boards. Novak helps set the strategic direction of the TAB, which oversees IEEE’s societies and technical councils, including their products and services.

From professor to entrepreneur

Novak, who grew up in Brisbane, Australia, fell in love with math and physics in high school. She wanted to have a STEM career. Her private all-girls school in the early 1980s didn’t have a career counselor, so she researched job possibilities at her local library.

“I determined that I wanted to do engineering rather than just science,” she says. “When I started to look into the different fields of engineering, I realized electrical engineering matched best because of the subjects I loved the most. I really wanted to say I was an engineer when I finished my degree.”

She graduated in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, then got a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1992 from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Her doctoral thesis was on the emerging field of semiconductor lasers for fiber-optic communications.

“A lot of my research has focused on developing new technologies for transporting very-high-frequency wireless signals over optical fiber and developing new methods that also enable high-performance radio-over-fiber systems,” she says.

She has published more than 280 papers; most are in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Shortly after earning her Ph.D., she was hired by the University of Melbourne as a professor of electrical and electronic 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 could conduct research at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

Several colleagues from the Naval Research Lab who went on to work at startups encouraged Novak and her husband to do the same. The two joined Dorsal Networks in Columbia, Md. At Dorsal, which builds undersea optical networks, she developed optical networking equipment for submarines.

“My husband and I had always wanted to spend some time working in the industry in the United States,” she says. “We didn’t necessarily see ourselves as being professors all of our lives.”

“IEEE is the professional home for everyone who works in the engineering field. It’s a club, and you need to be in it.”

Dorsal was acquired by Corvis, an optical network equipment manufacturer in Columbia. It then purchased Broadwing, a telecommunications service provider, and took on that name. The company went out of business in 2003.

The couple and their business partner, Austin Farnham, a former managing director at Corvis, founded Octane in 2004. Farnham is president, and Waterhouse is chief technology officer.

“We decided that we were going to fund our own company and bootstrapped it through research grants,” Novak says. “Our background writing research proposals as professors actually played a really important role in getting the company off the ground.”

Career Advice: Don’t Overplan Your Career

Do not focus on failure when things don’t go according to plan, Novak advises.

“I think when you’re younger, you’re more inclined to internalize failures or dwell on things that don’t go right, such as having a paper rejected or not receiving a scholarship,” she says. “I know it’s not easy to put something in the past and focus on the next thing you’re trying for.”

Setting career milestones can be a helpful way to track progress and stay motivated, but she cautions against focusing on them too much, because you could end up overplanning your career.

The opportunity to move from Australia to the United States, for example, came out of the blue, she says.

“It wasn’t anything that I was expecting to happen,” she says. “I think you always have to be open to opportunities that you weren’t expecting. Not that you necessarily have to take them, but just don’t be so focused on what you want to accomplish that you don’t see other opportunities that come your way.”

And, of course, consider volunteering for IEEE. She says that volunteering has made her a more effective communicator.

“Giving technical talks at a conference is primarily focused on the technology,” she says. “In industry, you have to explain the technology you are working on in simpler terms since you are presenting your work to people with various levels of engineering knowledge.” As a volunteer leader, she adds, “you have to think about how to focus people’s efforts and bring them together to form a consensus while also making everyone feel like they are being listened to.”

The company initially was constrained to working on projects for which they received funding, but it has evolved and no longer applies for research grants, Novak says.

“We are very much focused on commercializing our technology and selling our products,” she says.

Giving back to the community

Novak’s Ph.D. advisor encouraged her to join IEEE because of its journals and conferences.

“You need to join IEEE because it’s really important for you to publish papers and go to its conferences,” he told her. “And that’s what you’re going to have to do in order to graduate.” She joined.

“IEEE is the professional home for everyone who works in the engineering field,” she says. “It’s a club, and you need to be in it.”

Some of the most important benefits for her, she says, are meeting authors of seminal papers, networking, and collaborating.

“What people don’t realize, particularly younger people, is the value of networking,” she says. “When I moved to the U.S., I already knew many people from attending IEEE meetings and through my volunteer work for it. I was able to talk to them about new opportunities, and we even applied for research grants together. These types of collaborations really expand your network.”

She says she feels strongly about giving back to the community through volunteering. She has served in many roles, particularly for the IEEE Photonics Society. She is a former president, vice president of membership, and a member of its board of governors.

“You get so much more return on your investment with your membership when you’re a volunteer,” she says. “You get to interact with really smart people and learn from them.

“Because IEEE is a global organization, you also meet people from around the world with different backgrounds and speaking different languages—which is an excellent way for people to expand their horizons.

“Volunteering is a great way to really open your mind to other people. And I think it just makes you grow as a person. Every volunteer experience I’ve had has enriched me personally.”

Novak’s Goals for Technical Activities

Here is what Novak says she plans to accomplish during her term as vice president of IEEE Technical Activities:

• Increase the volunteer pipeline. Societies and councils have passionate volunteers who want to contribute within their particular technical community, she says, but they don’t typically volunteer for the Technical Activities Board or its committees. Novak wants to find ways to get them more involved with the TAB, and she particularly wants to encourage younger members to serve.
• “One Technical Activities.” Similar to IEEE President Kathleen Kramer’s aspiration of creating a One IEEE framework that fosters more collaborations, Novak says there’s an opportunity to create One Technical Activities. She would like societies, councils, and technical communities to work and engage more directly with all of the TAB’s standing committees. “I really want to find ways in which they can engage more effectively and work more cohesively,” she says. “We talk about having silos across the IEEE, but we also have silos within the TAB because each of the 47 societies and councils is unique and operates very differently.”
• Cross-committee collaboration. She would like to promote more cohesion with other major IEEE boards including Educational Activities and the Standards Association.
• Inter-committee support. She wants societies to provide more support to their technical chapters and student chapters. Chapters have two parents: the geographical section and the society. The society funds the chapter’s activities, and the section controls the purse strings. Sometimes there is a difference between what the chapters want to fund and what the section leadership wants to spend money on, she says.