Radenka Marić (Đekić)
Radenka Maric is an engineer and academic who became the 17th president of the University of Connecticut on September 28, 2023. She was the first internal candidate to be named president since Harry J. Hartley in 1990 and is the institution’s second female president. Prof. Marić is also the first Bosnian born woman to become president of a USA university and the first non USA born person to become the president of this prestigious academic institution founded in 1881, which today is among the best state universities in the USA.
where she grew up, and graduated from the Faculty of Technology of the University of Belgrade in 1989. Then she got a job at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 1991, she received a scholarship from the Japanese Ministry and went to the University of Kyoto, where she obtained her doctorate in 1996.
Born and raised in Derventa and earned her BS from the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Technology of the University of Belgrade in 1989. She received a scholarship from the Japanese Ministry and attained her MS and PhD in materials science and energy from Kyoto University in Japan. After spending 12 years in Japan, she moved to the United States in 2001 to work at a clean-energy startup in Atlanta. Three years later, she began leading the Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation at the National Research Council Canada. She joined UConn in 2010 as a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. In 2016–2017, she was a visiting Fulbright chair professor at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy.
A Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, Maric holds the faculty appointment of Connecticut Clean Energy Fund Professor of Sustainable Energy in UConn's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Over the course of her career, she received more than $40 million in research funding, published more than 300 articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings, and registered six patents.
Maric became vice president for Research, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship in July 2017. In this role, she oversaw the $375 million research enterprise at UConn and UConn Health, including the Technology Incubation Program and the Innovation Partnership Building at UConn Tech Park.
Maric was named a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019. She is a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. Her scholarly work has resulted in more than 300 articles in refereed journals and conference proceedings, 21 book chapters and invited review articles in major journals, one book published, and two books under preparation. She also has six issued patents and 11 published patent disclosures. She serves on numerous review panels for the Department of Energy, the European Commission, and Horizon 2020 and serves as a board member of the International Academy of Electrochemical Energy Science.