English
Bosanski
prof. Zlatan Akšamija, University of Utah
Dear members of BHAAAS,
I am honored to take the helm of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian-American Association of Arts and Sciences (BHAAAS), an organization that has become my scientific “home away from home” and my main connection to like-minded researchers in my native Bosnia and Herzegovina. I accept this duty with equal measures of dedication and enthusiasm to fulfill our mission of advancing the creation, application, and respect of knowledge among the Bosnian diaspora around the world and in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
I see our organization as a team - we are all individually accomplished and have roles in the organization that can contribute to our mutual success, but we only win if we work together as a team. What does winning mean for BHAAAS?
Every meaningful connection that leads to an exchange of ideas is a win. Every student who imagines a brighter future after hearing an inspiring lecture or participating in a workshop is a win.
Every step forward, however small it seems at the time, is building toward a sustainable future for us as a people and our shared homeland.
How do we best work as a team? In the words of a fictional soccer coach Ted Lasso, we must “be curious, not judgmental.” Curiosity is the most innate, natural driving force of the intellect - it is the child within us always asking questions that arise from an insatiable thirst for knowledge and the need to understand the world around us. When we stop asking questions, we cease to grow and instead begin to judge.
BHAAAS has always been a vehicle for both personal and collective intellectual growth. To sustain that growth, let us keep asking questions to learn about each other and the exciting, impactful work that other members are doing. Then we will better understand one another and this will enable us to work together more productively and harmoniously.
I grew up in Sarajevo in the 1980’s in a home that was equal parts music, science, and literature. My father Šefko co-founded Bosnia’s oldest rock band Indexi so our home was always filled with rock music. But he was also active in Sarajevo’s amateur radio (“radio amater”) club and my earliest memories are of him tinkering with a radio transmitter, electronic parts strewn across his desk. From him I inherited an equal love of music and electronics, which would later lead me to my career in engineering.
This combined heritage of art and science drew me from an early age to seek connections across disciplines and view the grand societal challenges of today, including energy, environment, and technology, as inherently interdisciplinary. This is probably why BHAAAS always felt like an intellectual home to me, and why I believe we must continue to place humanities, arts, sciences, technology, and medicine on an equal footing in our organization.
When I first arrived to the United States, a teenager and high school freshman, I was lost and hopeless. It felt like the world I grew up in has ceased to exist, and everything I knew was destroyed. I was starting from scratch in a new world, 16 years behind everyone else. But my mother Vesna drilled into me that “everything can be taken away from us except knowledge.” And this motto became my beacon through college, graduate school, postdoctoral research, and faculty career. “To learn” became a moral imperative, not just a means to an end.
Education was duty, rather than a requirement to land a job or further my career. Research and teaching, the two equal parts of a professor’s job, became acts of service rather than mere employment. BHAAAS, with its focus on the exchange of knowledge and volunteer service to our community, feels like the perfect place to carry this torch that has been passed to me.
In closing, I wish to serve as your president, hear your ideas, and make BHAAAS the best platform to carry out your initiatives. But this means you, the members, must contribute the most valuable assets you have—your knowledge, your experience, and your time—to help me carry out our shared vision of a better future for Bosnians and Herzegovinians throughout the world.
Sincerely,
Zlatan Akšamija
BHAAAS president