Born in Yugoslavia in 1941, during the Second World War and growing up in the coastal town of Rijeka in what is now Croatia, Marovac excelled in his studies and graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, before obtaining a PhD in computer science from Imperial College London.

He became regarded as one of the top mathematicians in Yugoslavia during the 1960s, and his scientific work took him to London, where he took up a research position at Imperial College London in 1969, and began his PhD in computer science.

Computer science in the late 1960s and early 1970s was still in its infancy, and through his work Professor Marovac helped to advance the field in key areas including computer graphics, distributed systems, software engineering processes and methodologies, and web technologies.

Professor Marovac's work took him to some of the leading computer science faculties around the world, including teaching at McGill University in Montreal, UMass in Boston, SUNY in New York and San Diego State University, where he eventually spent the bulk of his career during a 25-year tenure. Marovac also worked in the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre in California which was one of the most innovative R&D hubs of its time.

Alongside these positions Professor Marovac was invited to undertake a number of roles around the world, including at Hangzhou University in China, at the German Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing, at the French Ministry of Research and Technology, at the Operational Research Center in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and many more.

As a leading researcher in computer science in Southern California during the 1980s and 1990s, Professor Marovac was closely involved with the then nascent scene in Silicon Valley technology startups and what has grown to become today's venture capital ecosystem.

Professor Marovac passed away in 2021. He is survived by his wife Anita, his son Nenad Marovac and daughter Jacqueline Marovac. His academic CV can be found here.