A Career in Engineering: The Journey From Academia to Industry - Dalma Novak at IEEE WIE Forum USA East 2017
In 2014, there were approximately 5.8 million employer firms in the United States, 99.7% of which were classified as small firms with fewer than 500 employees. Pharad, a privately owned technology company established in 2004, is one of those small businesses. This talk will tell the story about Pharad and the journey of Dalma Novak, a former University Professor who chose to leave her academic existence behind to make the transition to industry. The challenges encountered in helping to build a successful engineering company and the lessons learned will be described.
Dalma Novak is VP of Engineering at Pharad, LLC who are developing advanced antenna, RF communications and RF-over-fiber technologies. Prior to co-founding Pharad in 2004, Dr. Novak spent 12 years as a member of the academic staff in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Melbourne, Australia; the last six months of which she was Professor and Chair of Telecommunications. From June 2001 – December 2003 she was a Technical Section Lead at Dorsál Networks, Inc. and later at Corvis Corporation where she led cross-disciplinary R&D teams developing WDM hardware for long-haul transmission systems. Her research interests include microwave photonics, fiber radio systems, wireless communications, high speed optical communication systems, and antenna technologies. She has published more than 280 papers in these technical areas, including seven book chapters. In 2007 she was elected to the grade of IEEE Fellow for contributions to enabling technologies for the implementation of fiber radio systems. Dr. Novak was President of the IEEE Photonics Society (IPS) during 2014 – 2015. She is also the former Chair of both the MTT-S and IPS Technical Committees on Microwave Photonics.
In 2014, there were approximately 5.8 million employer firms in the United States, 99.7% of which were classified as small firms with fewer than 500 employees. Pharad, a privately owned technology company established in 2004, is one of those small businesses. This talk will tell the story about Pharad and the journey of Dalma Novak, a former University Professor who chose to leave her academic existence behind to make the transition to industry. The challenges encountered in helping to build a successful engineering company and the lessons learned will be described.