Janko Nikolić-Žugić was born and raised in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, which, at the time, was a relatively open Communist country under Josip Broz Tito. His father was an orthopedic surgeon and his mother was a researcher at the Institute for Cultural Development Studies. Nikolić-Žugić was interested in science from a young age, perusing his parents' extensive library and finding issues in molecular biology and the like quite fascinating. He went to his primary school for eight years before moving into a specialization in the natural sciences in his secondary school (Yugoslavia had a Gymnasium system). At the age of fifteen or so he became a competitive volleyball player, practice for which occupied most of his nights and weekends. While all of his coursework was intense, and while he enjoyed science, Nikolić-Žugić realized that there were no careers for molecular biologists in Yugoslavia, so he decided to enter the medical track to become a physician. He entered the Belgrade University Medical School and undertook his medical studies while still having an interest in the practice and study of science more broadly. He received guidance and advice from Miodrag L. Lukić and Marija Mostarica-Stojković, who studied immunology, to do some scientific laboratory work abroad in the United States. Nikolić-Žugić took this advice and went for a few months over a few summers to work with Henry H. Wortis at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts; this was Nikolić-Žugić's first laboratory experiences and influenced his decision to leave clinical medicine and pursue a scientific career in the United States. He received a master's of science while still in Belgrade, though his studies were interrupted by the civil war, and then a doctoral degree under Lukić, during which time he completed his compulsory military service, working on T cell development. After meeting and marrying his wife, he went on to a postdoctoral position in Michael J. Bevan's lab at the University of California, San Diego studying intrathymic T cells, and then accepted a position at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he began his research on specificity in self-peptide selection by T cell receptors. Throughout the interview Nikolić-Žugić discusses his views on Yugoslavia, its culture, its educational system, its political structure, and the state of the country after the various social and political upheavals. In addition, at the end of the interview he discusses his experimental method; his wife's work as a flow cytometry operator in his lab; the science-oriented environment of his home; the necessity of animal research; and balancing family life and his career. The interview concludes with his thoughts on his own mentoring style; the way his medical training frames his research, the role of the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences in his work; the "illogic" concept of gene patenting; funding and its relationship to the direction of research in the United States; publishing; and more on science and politics in the former Yugoslavia.