Biography
Dalma Novak is VP of Engineering at Pharad, LLC who are developing advanced antenna and high performance 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, high speed optical communication systems, wireless communications, 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 during 2014-2015 and Past President from 2016-2017. To strengthen the Society’s diversity mission, during her term she launched a Women in Photonics program to support the participation, engagement and advancement of women in the photonics community. She now serves the IEEE Photonics Industry Engagement Standing Committee.