North Macedonia has fewer than two million people. In 2021, six of them showed up on Stanford and Elsevier’s ranking of the world’s most-cited scientists across all of history — a list that usually reads like a roster from MIT, a Max Planck institute, or a top Chinese university. That’s not a fluke tied to one lucky lab.
It traces back to the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, founded in 1967, which has spent nearly six decades pulling researchers into genetics, electrochemistry, and physics instead of watching them scatter abroad for good. Here are twelve scientists born in North Macedonia — mathematicians, geneticists, engineers, and one analog astronaut — sorted from the founding generation to the ones still publishing today.
Table of Contents
- Blagoj Popov — Mathematician
- Georgi Efremov — Geneticist and Molecular Biologist
- Leonid Grcev — Electrical Engineer
- Ljupčo Kocarev — Physicist, Chaos Theory and Complex Systems
- Trajche Stafilov — Analytical and Environmental Chemist
- Ivan Grozdanov — Materials Chemist
- Valentin Mirceski — Electrochemist
- Rubin Gulaboski — Bioelectrochemist
- Kiril Sotirovski — Forest Pathologist
- Goce Spasovski — Nephrologist
- Biljana Risteska Stojkoska — Computer Scientist
- Martina Dimoska — Materials Engineer and Analog Astronaut
1. Blagoj Popov (1923–2014) — Mathematician
Popov studied in Belgrade and Sofia, then joined the University of Skopje in 1948 under advisor Dragoslav Mitrinović, a connection that plugged Macedonian mathematics straight into the wider Yugoslav school of analysis. He chaired the math department from 1951, made full professor in 1963, and served as the university’s rector from 1967 to 1969 — the same year he became a founding member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
His research sat in differential equations and special functions, the kind of math that shows up inside engineering and physics problems rather than staying locked in theory. Over 70 published works, plus academic exchanges in Paris, Hamburg, and the United States, made him the reference point for everyone who studied analysis in the country after him.
2. Georgi Efremov (1932–2011) — Geneticist and Molecular Biologist
Born in Kratovo, Efremov trained at the University of Zagreb’s veterinary faculty and defended his doctorate in Belgrade in 1963. He then built molecular genetic diagnostics in Macedonia from nothing, founding the Research Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology at the Academy of Sciences and Arts.
His specialty was hemoglobin — mapping the specific variants and thalassemia alleles that show up in Balkan and Mediterranean populations, work still referenced in hematology literature today. He also spent a year and a half as the country’s Minister of Science in the early 1990s and later served as ambassador to China, a detour most lab scientists never take.
3. Leonid Grcev (b. 1951) — Electrical Engineer
Grcev was born in Skopje and built his career at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, becoming an IEEE Fellow in 2013 for something almost nobody outside power engineering thinks about: what actually happens underground when lightning or a fault current hits a grounding system.
His transient electromagnetic models describe how current disperses through soil and grounding grids in the microseconds after a strike, and they now inform how engineers design grounding for substations and transmission towers. It’s invisible infrastructure work, but it’s the kind that keeps a fault from turning into a fire.
4. Ljupčo Kocarev (b. 1955) — Physicist, Chaos Theory and Complex Systems
Kocarev did his entire education in Skopje, from primary school through his doctorate, then spent 1999 to 2016 at the University of California, San Diego’s Institute for Nonlinear Science. His research took chaotic dynamical systems — the unpredictable, sensitive-to-initial-conditions kind of math — and turned them into encryption tools, building block ciphers based on chaotic maps.
He’s published more than 140 journal articles and 150 conference papers since 1986, and he’s been president of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts since January 2020. He’s also one of the six Macedonians who landed on Stanford’s database of the world’s most-cited scientists across all of history, the ranking behind most of the “top 2%” headlines about the country’s research output.
5. Trajche Stafilov — Analytical and Environmental Chemist
Stafilov graduated from the Faculty of Science in Skopje in 1972 and, before returning to academia, spent seven years running the lab at a ferronickel plant in Kavadarci — an industry stint that shaped his research focus for the next four decades: tracking where heavy metals and trace elements end up in soil, water, and air.
He’s published over 500 papers, with more than 5,400 citations in Web of Science alone, and won Macedonia’s state award for scientific achievement in 2009. Much of his environmental monitoring data on the country’s mining regions still has no real substitute.
6. Ivan Grozdanov — Materials Chemist
Grozdanov spent his career as a professor of general and inorganic chemistry working on something you’ll never see with the naked eye: nanocrystalline semiconductor thin films — cadmium selenide, bismuth sulfide, zinc selenide — grown just a few atoms thick.
He developed a cheaper electroless chemical deposition method for metal sulfides and selenides that skips the vacuum equipment usually required for that kind of work, and his experiments detecting quantum confinement effects in chemically deposited zinc selenide dots have been cited by more than 3,700 researchers in materials science.
7. Valentin Mirceski — Electrochemist
Mirceski, a full professor at the Institute of Chemistry at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, is credited with modernizing square-wave voltammetry — a technique for measuring how fast electrons move across an electrode surface, used everywhere from drug testing to corrosion research.
With over 200 published papers on electrochemistry and ionic liquids, he’s ranked in Stanford’s cumulative list of the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists of all time, alongside three other names on this list.
8. Rubin Gulaboski — Bioelectrochemist
Gulaboski trained as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the University of Saarland in Germany before returning to teach at Goce Delčev University in Štip. His work centers on protein-film voltammetry — wiring proteins directly onto an electrode to watch how they trade electrons — which matters for biosensor design and for understanding how respiration works at the molecular level.
He’s been cited by more than 9,000 researchers, a number that puts him well inside Stanford’s top 2% list alongside Mirceski, Kocarev, and Leonid Grcev.
9. Kiril Sotirovski — Forest Pathologist
Sotirovski graduated from the Faculty of Forestry in Skopje in 1989 and built his career studying chestnut blight — the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica that wiped out most of North America’s chestnut trees in the twentieth century. Rather than chasing eradication, his research tests hypovirulence: a weaker viral strain that infects the fungus itself and blunts how aggressively it kills the tree.
His comparative studies of chestnut blight populations across Macedonia, Croatia, and Switzerland tracked how both the disease and its viral counter spread through European forests, work that’s shaped biological control strategy well beyond the Balkans.
10. Goce Spasovski — Nephrologist
Spasovski trained in Skopje, Antwerp, Katowice, and Athens before returning home to build a nephrology program essentially from scratch. He’s led as principal investigator on 18 clinical trials covering chronic kidney disease progression, anemia, and bone disease in dialysis patients, and chairs the Macedonian Society of Nephrology, Dialysis, Transplantation and Artificial Organs.
In 2023, the International Society of Nephrology gave him its Pioneer Award for Eastern and Central Europe, recognition reserved for physicians who built a specialty in a region that didn’t really have one before them.
11. Biljana Risteska Stojkoska (b. 1982) — Computer Scientist
Stojkoska was born in Ohrid and never left Ss. Cyril and Methodius University for her training: a diploma in 2006, a master’s in 2008, and a PhD in 2013 on data fusion in wireless sensor networks. She now teaches at the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, researching the unglamorous plumbing behind the Internet of Things — how cheap, battery-powered sensors decide which of them reports data, and how much you can actually trust a signal-strength reading for indoor positioning.
Her published work on indoor localization gets cited in IoT deployments well outside Macedonia’s borders, in a field where women remain a small minority of published authors.
12. Martina Dimoska — Materials Engineer and Analog Astronaut
Dimoska, from the town of Kičevo, graduated top of her class in materials engineering and nanotechnology at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in 2019 — by which point she was already the youngest patent holder in the country. She went on to the International Space University for a master’s in space studies and became the first woman from the Balkans to serve as an analog astronaut, spending 21 days inside a simulated Mars habitat built around a 20-minute communication delay in each direction, matching the real lag between Mars and Earth.
She now works with NASA’s Johnson Space Center through Leidos and founded the International Space Alliance, a nonprofit built to get more people from underrepresented countries into space research.
Why a Country of Under Two Million Keeps Showing Up on Global Rankings
None of these twelve worked in isolation. Most trained, taught, or still hold appointments at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the independent research institution the state assembly chartered in 1967 specifically to keep scientific talent inside the country instead of losing it to bigger neighbors. Six decades later, that concentration shows up directly in the citation data: Kocarev, Grcev, Mirceski, Gulaboski, Stafilov, and Grozdanov all cleared the bar for Stanford and Elsevier’s ranking of the world’s most-cited scientists, a list built from standardized citation metrics rather than reputation or institutional prestige.
That’s the real story behind “scientists from North Macedonia” as a search topic — not one genius, but one institution that kept producing them, generation after generation, in a country most people couldn’t place on a map.
