About Me, In My Words

I didn’t find medicine, it found me.

I grew up in a household shaped by medical oncology and nuclear physics: my mother a professor of oncology, my father a medical nuclear physicist. I was handed a proverbial pipette and a stethoscope as early as the age of 5. From such an early age, I absorbed scientific inquiry, patient stories, and the way medicine shows up in real lives.

I trained intensively through medical school during war times in Serbia, then  earned my PhD in cancer cell biology at Imperial College in London hereafter, and built a career I only could have once dreamed of: practicing medicine in clinic, leading clinical research, and directing drug development oncology programs. But something didn’t add up.

I saw patients thrive despite severe diagnoses, while others struggled long after remission. The patterns weren’t only biological, they were neurological, emotional, and adaptive.

At the same time, I lived my own health journey. Years of perfectionism, porous boundaries in personal and professional relationships, acute and chronic stress from war in the country to family drama, and all the unprocessed imprints these events left within my body, eventually surfaced as an auto-immune ulcerative colitis. I realized firsthand that symptoms can be and very often are deeply interlinked with self abandonment, inconsistencies in life, hardships through which we learn to adapt and survive.  They are neurological outputs shaped by experience, belief, survival responses, and nervous system safety or lack thereof.

That realization became the pivot point for my own innerwork. 

I began to study the nervous system’s role in survival and healing. I pursued advanced training in Neurosomatic Intelligence (NSI), the Whole Health Medicine Institute (WHMI) frameworks, and trauma-informed care.

I didn’t leave science behind, I expanded it. And I returned to the truth.