Dejan Ilić Ph.D. is an acknowledged scientist, entrepreneur, and manager of world repute. Hailing from the village of Selevac near Smederevo, in addition to his academic career - at the Belgrade University, then specialisation and doctoral studies in Dresden, a professorship in Graz in 2002, he replaced his volleyball career with world renown for innovation and in top management. He gained his first experiences in industry at VARTA in early 1987, and then his career as a successful innovator and researcher who immediately applies his work in practise continued in 2007 at the ARRI Group, a world leader in the production of equipment for film and television

A respected and recognised geneticist, a pioneer in many scientific disciplines, including the isolation, growth and differentiation of stem cells, he studied in both Belgrade and Germany and achieved great scientific achievements in the UK and Spain. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have offspring of his own, but with his knowledge he has helped almost 800 babies get a start in life at the Special Hospital for the Treatment of Sterility in Leskovac, which has led to this institution becoming very prominent and significant in the world

One of the most versatile contemporary violinists, Benjamin Schmid, speaks exclusively to CorD about his life, which he says is “more important than a career”. A particular strength of his can be found in his exceptionally broad repertoire and very personal style. At the core of his career are works by Austrian composers like Berg, Goldmark, Korngold, Kreisler, Mozart, Muthspiel, Schoenberg and Webern

From the neighbourhoods of Belgrade and a childhood love for puzzles and patterns, via Master and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, working at Carnegie Mellon, the co-founding of a company and the spreading of innovation and knowledge at respected universities and conferences across Europe and the U.S., to taking up the reins of the Tandor School of Engineering, progress has been a long road for Jelena Kovačević, and an exciting journey

He has signed his name to around 30 feature and documentary films, winning the most awards in Yugoslavia and Croatia, while his latest film, The Constitution, is considered the boldest and one of the best films shot in recent decades on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. He has lectured in America for over 25 years and is a prominent professor and ‘Eminent Scholar in Film’ at Ohio University

This celebrated Yugoslav and Serbian actor will this year commemorate half a century of performing on stage, film and television with a great exhibition at the Museum of Theatrical Arts in Belgrade. He says of himself that he has two vices – smoking and acting. He can’t give up either of them, as they both bring him great satisfaction

This long-serving political journalist and commentator of publications Borba, Večernje Novosti and Politika, and former editor-in-chief of NIN, became a partisan courier of the First Proletarian Brigade before he turned 16, just to survive the Srem Front at the end of World War II. He knew or was closely associated with the majority of political actors on the post-war Yugoslav and Serbian political scene, whom he discusses in this confession

This great Yugoslav actor, who has enjoyed a glittering international film career, talks about how – as a Serb from Croatia - he left a country at war in the 1990s, which is why hatred is a foreign word to him, and he teaches his students in Rijeka about that today. He has been a guest in the home of famous Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, and long ago he drove today's Croatian Prime Minister to basketball training with his own sone when they were kids. He has shot films with global stars, but for him the only remaining Hollywood great is Warren Beatty

This writer and polemicist is a critic of socialism and the multi-party system, but also the government that expelled Serbs from Croatia. He has adopted the idea that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, while he says that today’s Croatia is coming apart at the seams. His new book, The Pre-Death Diary, has upset the public with its handling of the topics of aging, suicide and death

He was four years old when jazz started being playing in Serbia. Today has reached the ripe old age of 93! He founded the first jazz orchestra in Serbia and was its conductor for 30 years, and has also met and heard the world’s greatest jazz musicians. He claims that jazz was viewed in post-WWII Yugoslavia with great suspicion; that the communist authorities didn’t like jazz, but he didn’t like the communists, so they were all square