Ninoslav Radovanovic

Ninoslav Radovanovic was born on 6 May 1940 in Nis, in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He completed primary and secondary school in Nis and went on to study at the University of Belgrade School of Medicine, finishing the course in the expected time with an average mark of 9.26. He worked for a period in Nis before moving abroad in 1967.

In 1967 Radovanovic went to Switzerland, where he worked first in general surgery. From 1970 he trained in cardiovascular surgery in Geneva under Professor Charles Hahn, and after five years he qualified as an assistant surgeon, then as a cardiovascular surgeon and a consultant surgeon. He completed postgraduate training at leading cardiovascular surgery centres in Geneva, Paris and Houston.

Back in Serbia he founded cardiac surgery at the Institute for Cardiovascular Diseases in Sremska Kamenica and became the institute's first director. "As the founder of cardiac surgery at the Institute for Cardiovascular Diseases in Sremska Kamenica, I began operations in 1984," he said in a recent interview, adding that by his retirement in 2006 the institute had performed 26,000 open heart operations. He personally carried out more than 13,000 coronary, valvular and congenital open heart operations using cardiopulmonary bypass, and took part in more than 7,000 operations in Serbia and abroad.

He was a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Novi Sad, a full professor from 1979, and published more than 1,200 papers alone or with colleagues. Among his innovations was a reductive annuloplasty of the double mitral and tricuspid orifices for patients with primary dilated cardiomyopathy. He led the project Quality of Life after Open Heart Surgery and the international WHO MONICA Novi Sad project, and served as president of the Mediterranean Association of Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery in 1987.

He was removed as director of the institute in 1999 in circumstances that the Serbian press described as unclear, was reinstated in 2001 following the political changes of October 2000, and was removed again in 2006. He then moved to Slovenia, where he founded a cardiovascular surgery centre in Izola.

Radovanovic was elected a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts on 30 October 2003 and a full member of its Department of Medical Sciences on 5 November 2009. His honours included the Order of the Yugoslav Flag with Gold Star (1979), the gold medal of the 10th Congress of Yugoslav Cardiologists (1989), the October Award of the City of Novi Sad (1989), the Order of Saint Sava First Class (1995), the February Award of the City of Novi Sad (1999), the Order of Njegos First Class of Republika Srpska and the Order of Sretenje First Class, awarded on Serbia's Statehood Day in 2024.

Ninoslav Radovanovic died in Novi Sad on 10 November 2026, in his 87th year, aged 86. His death was reported the next day by the Novi Sad news sites 021.rs and Moj Novi Sad. The cause of death was not made public.

The news was first shared on Instagram by his colleague Professor Ilija Srdanovic, and many people replied with their own stories of Radovanovic operating on them or on members of their families and saving their lives. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

Radovanovic is remembered as the founder of open heart surgery at Sremska Kamenica, which grew into one of the leading cardiac centres in the region, and as a surgeon who brought techniques learned in Switzerland, France and the United States back to Serbia. Tens of thousands of patients were operated on at the institute he built, and he trained generations of cardiac surgeons in Novi Sad and later in Slovenia.