It might not have a Nike swoosh engraved on it, but the putter that Rich Wolf invented and patented while he was a Caltech graduate student not only improved his golf game, it also launched his career in technology transfer.

A Putter with a Purpose

Caltech’s director of technology transfer turned his love of golf into a career helping Caltech scientists and engineers market their inventions

By Michael Rogers

Thanks to his love of tree-lined fairways, immaculate putting greens, and all other things related to golf, Rich Wolf, PhD ’97, is sequestered in a nondescript office above a machine shop in Caltech’s Central Engineering Services building, helping other people on campus realize their dreams.

Wolf is director of Caltech’s Office of Technology Transfer (OTT), which fosters and promotes start-up companies and licensing activity at Caltech. But it was his own idea for a product that steered him to the job of guiding other would-be inventors and entrepreneurs on campus.

Wolf became actively involved with technology transfer as a Caltech grad student. After getting his bachelor’s degree from Princeton, he came to Caltech in 1992 to study earthquake geology. An avid golfer, Wolf found time to visit local links when he wasn’t in classes or the lab. On one golf outing, he stood on the side of the practice putting green, studying golfers’ techniques. He noticed that the better players raised the blade of their putter just before striking the ball to increase the ball’s spin and improve the accuracy of their putting. “I wondered if there was a way to do that artificially,” he says. “I thought, ‘If you can raise the center of mass in the putter itself, you will increase torsional forces.’ That’s simple Newtonian physics.”

So Wolf designed a putter with a raised center of mass. At about the same time he discovered Bill Johnson, PhD ’75, across campus in the Keck Lab. The Mettler Professor of Engineering and Applied Science had started a company called Liquidmetal Technologies, which was also developing high-tech golf clubs. Liquidmetal helped Wolf develop his putter while he assisted the company with some of its projects. With Caltech’s help, Wolf got two patents for his putter design, and a company in Utah began manufacturing it. (While Wolf says that the club worked well and improved his game, the company eventually went out of business.)

After receiving his PhD for developing a tool for measuring the thermal history in rocks and sediment, which is useful for understanding hydrocarbon maturation, Wolf turned down geology jobs in industry, opting instead to take a position with the Institute’s recently established Office of Technology Transfer, reviewing new technologies at JPL. “In science, you make a commitment to one thing,” Wolf says. “The JPL job taught me a lot of different things, from physics to microbiology. I got excited with the opportunity in industry to capitalize on these diverse scientific and engineering projects.

“It turns out that at JPL there are licensing opportunities in areas that are not noticed,” Wolf says. “The lab is great at developing sensors and microdevices, but they haven’t exploited those technologies. What is important to NASA and the mission of JPL is not in parallel with what industry is interested in.”

Strengthening the connections of Caltech and JPL with industry is exactly why the Institute formed the OTT in 1995. It was also a direct response to the growing interest in entrepreneurism among Caltech faculty, staff, and students, fueled, in part, by the high-technology boom that began in the 1980s and the decline in government funding for science that started in the early 1990s.

Wolf says that OTT has five functions: “To act as an advocate for much of the faculty and students to see the technology that they develop commercialized; to legally protect the intellectual capital of the Institute; to benefit the taxpayers who fund research projects so that they might develop into useful new products that improve the way we live; to generate money for the Institute; and to promote entrepreneurism, so that we can help Caltech’s next generation of entrepreneurs instead of discourage them.”

The Office of Technology Transfer celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, and while many companies have come and gone in that time, the Institute’s scientists and engineers have kept OTT staff busy filing patents, working out licensing deals, and assisting in start-ups.

In 2004, for the second year in a row, Caltech ranked second in the number of patents issued to academic institutions in the United States (behind the entire University of California system), even though its total was down slightly from 147 in 2003 to 140 in 2004. Invention disclosures for 2004 totaled 196 for Caltech, up from 135 in 2003. And license agreements and options totaled 52 last year, compared with 41 the year before. Over time, Caltech start-ups have averaged out to about 10 each year since the inception of the office, with the highest number of start-ups occurring in 1999 and 2000. In recent years it has tapered off, with only four new start-up deals in 2004.

“The downturn in the economy over the past couple of years hurt us,” says Wolf, who became the OTT’s associate director in 2001, assisting then-director Larry Gilbert, who is today the senior director. “Companies in which Caltech has a financial interest lost value, and that, of course, diminished our equity positions. We have had to refocus our efforts on doing licensing deals with larger companies or renegotiating deals. So we actually have been busier than usual.”

Wolf, named OTT director in 2003, figures that the worst is now over. “We are done with the high-flying days of 1999 and 2000, and we seem to be done with the low-flying times of the last two years,” he says. He predicts that the Institute will be back on track soon, doing eight to 10 start-up company deals each year on average for the near future.

The OTT staff definitely has a better than average understanding of the technologies coming out of Caltech labs, since half of its staff members are Caltech alums. They include Fred Farina, MS ’92, the associate director, Scott Carter, PhD ’99, the assistant director, and licensing associates Karina Edmonds, PhD ’98, and Michael Slessor, PhD ’98. “We have a bias toward hiring people with a technology background,” Wolf says, adding that Institute alumni have valuable insider information when it comes to the job of developing a rapport with Caltech faculty.

Working closely with Caltech scientists and engineers is one of the favorite parts of his job, Wolf says. Especially in the case of spin-offs, he has to learn the nuts and bolts of a diverse array of Caltech technologies before he can help their developers create a strategy for commercializing the enterprises. Some of the new Caltech devices that he’s particularly excited about include a miniature, bladeless heart pump developed by Mory Gharib, PhD ’83, Caltech’s Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering, and a new suture developed by Mark Davis, the Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering, which includes a feature for time-releasing drugs into a wound.

Working every day with Caltech inventors, Wolf finds it hard to resist the entrepreneurial bug that got him started with OTT in the first place. “I am really into it,” he says. “At some point, it would be fun to take a short leave and run a company and get involved in the technology. Will that happen soon? You never know.”