Niko Vlaho Gjaja

A proud immigrant and US citizen, engineer, entrepreneur, and devoted husband, father, and grandfather, Niko died at home in Arlington, Virginia on November 14. He was 90. He is survived by his wife of 59 years, Vesna; his two sons, Vojin and Marin; his daughter-in-law, Kate; and his three grandchildren, Nikolai, Alexandra, and Stefan. He was born on August 1, 1935 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and was the older of two sons of Vlaho, a PhD mechanical engineer who worked in railroad engineering, and Aleksandra, a conservatory-trained pianist. He and his family survived the Nazi invasion and occupation of Belgrade as well as the subsequent Allied bombing and liberation of the city. Niko earned a BS in Physical Chemistry from Belgrade University in 1961, and, after completing compulsory military service, he found a job in Genoa, Italy at the engineering conglomerate Ansaldo. On his first trip back to Yugoslavia in 1965, he met Vesna in Dubrovnik. Just over a year later, they were married and on their way to the US aboard an ocean liner with just eight suitcases. He joined the General Electric Materials and Processes Laboratory in Schenectady, New York the day after he arrived. Over the next 20 years, his career progressed at GE even as he turned down chances to move away from Schenectady so as not to disrupt his sons' education, settling in nearby Niskayuna, New York. In 1986, at age 50, he became an entrepreneur by agreeing with GE to spin out the Materials and Processes Laboratory, incorporating it as The M&P Lab, Inc. and serving as President until he sold it in 2007. Throughout his life, he was handy and active, working on cars, in the yard, tending to beloved rose bushes, doing home repairs, and, as he aged, shifting his focus to building and maintaining various computers. His interests were broad, encompassing books, opera, sailing, building wooden boats, traveling, history, and art, but not art museums, which he saw as "prisons for art." He balanced being both a romantic and a humanist and was avidly anti-communist and anti-socialist given his experiences with collectivism in the former Yugoslavia. As a devoted father, through teaching and by example, he instilled in his sons a sense of loyalty, a commitment to duty, the value of both a broad and technical education, fiercely independent thinking, a keen sense of morals and ethics, and a skepticism of authority. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to Johns Hopkins Medicine at either https://secure.jhu.edu/form/fjhm or by contacting The Fund for Johns Hopkins Medicine, 750 East Pratt Street, 17th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21202, 410-361-6548 or philanthropy@jhmi.edu.

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