Our dear colleague, Dr Mirjana Popović Božić, a distinguished physicist, passed away on 2 September 2025, at the age of 79, in Boston, United States of America.
The funeral service for Dr Popović Božić will be held on Sunday, 7 September, at 5 p.m. She will be laid to rest at Mount Pleasant Cemetery (70 Medford St, Arlington).
Dr Božović was born in Šabac in 1947, where she completed primary school and part of her secondary education, graduating from high school in Belgrade. She went on to enrol at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, where she earned the title of Engineer of Physics.
Dr Popović Božić obtained her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Belgrade, in 1976.
During her entire professional career, she worked at the Institute of Physics Belgrade and made an impact on numerous generations of physicists through her ideas, diligence and demeanour.
She was employed at the Centre for Theoretical Physics, where she became a principal research fellow in 1994. As a visiting researcher, she spent time at several renowned foreign institutions, including the Institute for Theoretical Science, University of Oregon, and the Department of Chemistry, University of Denmark.
She made significant scientific contributions in the fields of biexciton theory, exchange interactions in molecules and magnets, spin theory, quantum mechanics of individual quantons, and quantum interferometry, as well as in the history of statistical physics and quantum mechanics.
She published 46 papers in international journals and dozens of articles in various proceedings. She participated in numerous national and international projects and established extensive international collaborations, including with the University of Oregon and the University of Colorado (USA), the Institute of Nuclear Sciences in Orsay and the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris (France), the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (Italy), the International Center for Physics and Applied Mathematics in Edirne (Turkey), the Atomic Institute of the Technical University of Vienna (Austria), and the Lebedev Institute in Moscow (Russia).
From the very beginning of her career, Dr Popović Božić was a devoted lecturer who invested great effort in activities involving young people. For decades, she taught postgraduate courses at the Faculty of Physics, University of Belgrade, and for several years she also lectured at the University of Norfolk in Virginia, USA. She held teaching positions at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, and Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering, and for two decades she taught a four-semester course in physics at the Faculty of Physics, University of Belgrade. As part of her teaching activities, she translated Niels Bohr’s book Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (Nolit, Belgrade, 1985) for use in her courses.
She used her extensive teaching experience, as well as numerous lectures and physics-related events, to publish papers on physics education. She was the author, translator, and editor of a number of publications aimed at physics students, teachers, and young people interested in science, and took part in a range of educational initiatives and projects. One of these, which continues to this day, is the Science Park in her native Šabac, a project she conceived in 2013 and realised together with several collaborators and with the support of the Institute of Physics and other institutions.
Throughout her career, and even after retirement, Dr Popović Božić devoted great effort to the spread of scientific ideas and the popularisation of physics, particularly among younger generations. She tirelessly advocated for strengthening the role of science in society and was deeply engaged in promoting the position of women in science.
She was married to the renowned physicist Dr Marko Popović (1936–2011) and was the mother of a daughter and a son.