A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

Gordana Vunjak-Novaković

Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic is a Serbian American engineer and currently a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University. She is the director of Columbia's Laboratory for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering. Vunjak-Novakovic is a highly cited researcher, having published 235 engineering papers, two books, 45 book chapters, and 34 patents. She had also given over 150 lectures across the world. Vunjak-Novakovic is an advisor to the federal government on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, serving as chair of NIH's tissue engineering section. Vunjak-Novakovic's areas of research include tissue engineering, bioreactors, biophysical regulation, tissue development, and stem cell research.

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Vunjak received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Belgrade, in Belgrade, Serbia. After her postgraduate study in Germany, she returned as a faculty to the University of Belgrade in its Chemical Engineering Department. Before arriving at Columbia, Vunjak worked as a Fulbright Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology from 1986 to 1987. She was an adjunct professor at Tufts University and from 1989 to 1992 a visiting professor in the Netherlands and MIT.

Vunjak was elected a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2002 and a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2012. In 2007, she became the first woman engineer to receive the distinction of giving the Director's Lecture at the National Institute of Health. In 2008, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, and in 2009, she was elected to the New York Academy of Sciences. Vunjak is a recipient of the Clemson Award given by the Biomaterials Society.

"Politika" Interview (pdf 1.6 MB)

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People Directory

Stephen Stepanchev

Dr. Stephen Stepanchev has inspired several generations of writers who have taken his creative writing classes from 1949 to 1985 at Queens College.

As Professor Emeritus of English, he now spends his time writing and reading poems in public places all across the City, and all the more so with his title as the first Poet Laureate of the borough of Queens, an appellation assigned for the period of 1997 through the year 2000.

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Publishing

In the Mirror

A Collection of Iconographic Essays and Illustrations

By Fr. Stamatis Skliris

The Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Western America is pleased to announce the publication of an outstanding book by Fr. Stamatis Skliris, a disciple of the great twentieth-century theologians Archimandrite Justin Popovich and Bishop Athanasius Yevtich. Fr. Stamatis is a parish priest in Athens and is renowned as an iconographer and as a writer and lecturer on Byzantine iconography.

In the Mirror is the second of a planned collection of works of contemporary theologians. It is an anthology of Fr. Stamatis’ articles which have appeared in Greek and Serbian. In it, he combines adherence to the teachings of the Church Fathers with a vibrant expression of faith through the experience of Christ in the Church. The book is adorned with more than 200 striking icons and illustrations by Fr. Stamatis.

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