Dalma Novak’s Journey From Professor to Entrepreneur

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.”

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.”

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.”