Academician Dejan B. Popović passed away

It is with deep regret that the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts announces that  Academician Dejan B. Popović aged 71 (b. Belgrade, 2 April 1950), secretary of the SASA Department of Technical Sciences died in Belgrade, on 4 October, after a long and serious medical condition. He particularly contributed to the field of biomedical engineering and robotics. His shrewd mind, prudence and ingenuity stimulated colleagues, researchers, students and everyone who had had the honour of making his acquaintance, and his readiness to listen and say the right words represented a reliable pillar of strength to everybody.

In 1974, he received his BSc, MSc in 1977 and PhD in 1982 from the Faculty of Electric Engineering of the University of Belgrade, while he was promoted to a full professor in 1995 at the same faculty. He was a professor of rehabilitation engineering at Aalborg University in Denmark in the period 1999-2014, and in 2015, he was elected Professor Emeritus at the same university.

He was elected a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2009, and its full member in 2015. He was a full member of the Academy of Engineering Sciences of Serbia (AESS) and a foreign member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Furthermore, Academician Popović was the president of the Society for ETRAN, as well as a member of specialist associations: International Functional Electrical Stimulation Society (IFESS), European Association of Medical and Biological Engineering (EAMBES) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

As an adjunct editor, he worked for the following publications: ‘IEEE Transactions of Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering’, ‘Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing, Medical Engineering and Physics’, ‘Journal of Neuromodulation’ and ‘Journal of Automatic Control’.

Academician Dejan B. Popović was the winner of numerous awards and recognitions, most distinguished being the one for the best paper at the IFAC Conference on Control in Biomedical Engineering, Galveston, Texas, USA (1992), Discobolos for the best ICT solution in medicine in 1998, and the award for patents of the European Patent Association, with Aleksandar Vega in 2015.

His passing represents a great loss to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and overall Serbian and world science.