Our Story

Sunita Williams was born in Euclid, Ohio, to Indian American neuroanatomist Deepak Pandya and Slovene American Ursuline Bonnie (Zalokar) Pandya, who reside in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Williams’s paternal family is from Jhulasan in the Mehsana district in Gujarat, India, while her maternal great-grandmother Mary Bohinc (originally Marija Bohinjec), born in Slovenia, immigrated to America as an 11-year-old with her mother, 1891 Slovene emigrant Ursula (Strajhar) Bohinac. Williams graduated from Needham High School in Needham, Massachusetts, in 1983. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in physical science from the United States Naval Academy in 1987 and a Master of Science degree in engineering management from Florida Institute of Technology in 1995. Sunita L. Williams (Suni) was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1998 and is a veteran of two space missions Expeditions 14/15 and 32/33. She is currently training for the first post-certification mission of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft – the second crewed flight for that vehicle – and her third long-duration mission aboard the International Space Station. Williams and her crewmates are working closely with Boeing to develop their new spacecraft systems, which will provide roundtrip crew transportation services to the International Space Station and, along with SpaceX’s CrewDragon, return the ability to launch humans into space from United States soil.

Prof. Mija Rode has dedicated her whole life to promote Slovenia, Slovenian language and culture in the US. Her extraordinary work is recognized by ASEF as extremely important and the one which is deeply connected with ASEF’s mission of building bridges between Slovenia and Slovenes all around the world. Prof. Rode was born and raised in Slovenia, moving with her family to Chicago at the age of 20. She obtained her master’s degree in library studies at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. She then got a job at the Stanford University Library, where she was quickly promoted to head the department, managing successful projects such as Early American Imprints and Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature. She was also appointed Stanford’s representative in the Library of Congress and Senior Librarian Emerita at the university. After her retirement, she worked on upgrading the Slovenian language syllabus and taught Slovenian in the Slovenian community in San Francisco and northern California. Prof. Rode also played an important role in founding the Slovenian course at Stanford last year as part of Stanford’s Language Center, which was a project of the Ljubljana Faculty of Arts. The program has proved popular and is already attended not only by Slovenians living abroad or their descendants but also by other young people interested in Slovenia.

In 2016 Prof. Dr. Duncan M. Haldane became the first Slovenian to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. He is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University, where his research focuses on topological states of quantum condensed matter, such as topological insulators. Prof. Haldane was born in London in 1951, in a medical family who greatly valued science and education. His mother, Ljudmila Renko, came from the Slovenian village Borovlje, located today in the Austrian side of Koroška (Carinthia). His father was a psychiatrist and came from Scotland. Ljudmila was a medical student working in a hospital when she met Prof. Haldane’s father, at the time an army doctor in the British Occupation Forces at the Austria-Slovenia border. Prof. Haldane’s parents’ backgrounds gave him a multicultural heritage, with relatives in both Scotland and in Slovenia/Austria. His family often visited Borovlje for summer holidays, so he became reasonably fluent in German. Prof. Haldane says his command of Slovenian sadly remained very basic. His mother was very proud of her heritage. Although Prof. Haldane grew up in London, without a trace of a Scottish or Slovenian accent, he self-identified as half-Scottish, half-Slovenian. Haldane earned his B.A. in 1973 and Ph.D. in 1978, both from the University of Cambridge. From 1977 to 1981 he was a physicist at Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France. He joined the faculty at the University of Southern California in 1981. He served as a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill from 1985 to 1988, and was a professor at the University of California-San Diego from 1986 to 1992. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1986 and awarded a Sloan Foundation fellowship from 1984 to 1988. He is known for a wide variety of fundamental contributions to condensed matter physics including the theory of Luttinger liquids, the theory of one-dimensional spin chains, the theory of fractional quantum hall effect, exclusion statistics, entanglement spectra and much more.

Dr. Edi Gobec’s life work has been to study, document, and preserve the influence of Slovenian culture all over the world. Dr. Gobec published a book named “Slovenian American Inventors and Innovators” which catalogs the tremendous achievements of Americans of Slovenian lineage. This book is replete with biographical information on the people responsible for the development of some of the most interesting innovations of the last 50 years. Dr. Gobec is also the founding director of the Slovenian Research Center in Cleveland. In 2020 The President of the Republic of Slovenia Borut Pahor awarded the Order of Merit to Dr. Gobec, for his life’s work and contribution to the recognition of Slovenia and the enrichment of knowledge about the achievements of Slovenes abroad.

Dr. Ronald Sega is an American astronaut with Slovenian roots (his grand-parents were born in Loški potok). He is currently a professor of systems engineering and Vice President for Energy and the Environment at the Colorado State University Research Foundation but is known by all the outstanding achievements during his work as the astronaut at NASA since 1991. From November 1994 to March 1995, Sega was the NASA Director of Operations, Star City, Russia (The Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center) responsible for managing NASA activities at Star City. These activities involved building an organization and infrastructure to support astronaut and cosmonaut mission and science training for flight on the Russian Space Station Mir. He also participated in training on Russian Space Systems and was the first American to train in the Russian EVA suit (Orlan) in their underwater facility (Hydrolaboratory). A veteran of two space flights (STS-60 in 1994 and STS-76 in 1996), Sega logged over 420 hours in space. (Source: US Embassy)

Dr. Zvonko Fazarinc became interested in electronics during his schooling in Celje. The path took him to America, where he moved with his entire family. His hitherto successful work enabled him to enroll at Stanford University in California. In 1965, he began to work at Hewlett-Packard Laboratory. Because of the great development opportunities and a good income remained loyal to the small firm at the time. However, he began lecturing certain fields of physics and electrical engineering in the electrical engineering department at Stanford University. At Hewlett – Packard Company, he has led a number of research projects since 1972 with medical, analytical, communication and systems fields. He participated in many inventions, including the important development of the minicomputer and GPS.

Dr. France Rode studied electrical engineering at the University of Ljubljana and after completing his studies gained experience in Germany. In 1960, he moved to the USA and made San Francisco his home. He successfully completed his Master’s Degree in Biomedicine at NorthwesternUniversity in Illinois in 1962 and, in the same year, started working at Hewlett-Packard in California, where his exceptional scientific path began. He was one of the leading engineers for more than twenty years. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard included Dr. Rode in the team of engineers focusing on the development of computing devices of the smallest dimensions. One day, Hewlett pointed to a clumsy desk calculator weighing almost 20 kilograms and said to the group of development engineers, including Dr. Rode, that he wanted to see that in a size which would fit into his shirt pocket. The engineers began developing a new device by first measuring the size of their boss’s pocket. The innovative HP-35 pocket calculator was then created. The greatest credits for producing the first integrated circuit and the design of a miniature processor were ascribed to Dr. Rode. Dr. Rode constantly developed new challenging products. After leaving the Hewlett-Packard company, he started his own business and was involved in the development of contactless radio frequency identification chips (RFID) and satellite signal receivers (GPS), which are used today in the majority of mobile phones and navigational devices for vehicles. One of his ingenious inventions was also the workplace entry card. Dr. Rode also participated in the development of the first laptop. He worked on the electronic lock and key system and some other security devices.