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The Academician Karaman was born in Skopje, in Macedonia in 1938, in a family of 14 biologists. Gordan finished elementary school in Split and a high-school in Dubrovnik. The Academician Karaman, after graduating from the lyceum, in 1957, enrolled in the Faculty of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, the Department of Biology in Skopje and graduated in 1961.
As a graduate biologist, the Academician Karaman came to Montenegro in 1963. In Kotor, in the Institute of Marine Biology, as the assistant, he studied fauna of the seabed of the Boka Kotorska Bay and of the Montenegrin coast of the Adriatic, with particular interest on a group of crabs - Amphipods.
He also studied fresh-water amphipods of the former Yugoslavia. In 1964, at the University in Belgrade, he defended his doctor’s thesis in the area of taxonomy and ecology of fresh-water Amphipods of Yugoslavia, as one of the youngest doctors of science in Yugoslavia at the time.
In 1967, Karaman moved to Podgorica where, as a senior research associate, he worked in the Biological Institute in Vranjina.
He spent a lot of time on different specializations and professional improvement: Station Marine d`Endoume et Centre d`Oceanographique, Marseille, France; Museo civico di Storia Naturale, Verona, Italy; Zoologisches Museum der Universitảt Humboldt in Berlin, Germany; Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the USA, as the Fulbright scholarship fellow; Limnological Institute of Baikal, Irkutsk, Russia, etc.
The Academician Karaman participated in numerous local and international scientific projects as a researcher or their manager, always reaffirming his knowledge and experience. Universal culture and excellent knowledge of his profession did not remain unnoticed abroad either, numerous scientific journals elected him as a member of their respective editing boards until the present days (Zootaxa; Acta Adriatica; Thallasia Jugoslavica, etc.).
When, in 1980, he was elected as the Director of the Institute of Biological and Medical Research of Montenegro, he advocated the development of those areas of science in Montenegro.
He delivered lectures as a professor at the Teacher-training College in Niksic. In the beginning of the nineties of the past century, the Department of Biology was founded at the Faculty of Natural and Mathematical Sciences in Podgorica, and the Academician Karaman was in the Organizing Committee for its foundation, participated in formation of the same, and was elected as the Full Professor at it, until his retirement in 2004. He also participated in establishing of post-graduate studies at the Department of Biology and was their first manager and a full-time lecturer until the present day.
His teaching and scientific activity was not limited to Montenegro only; he was a mentor of students up to the degrees of masters and doctors of science at the Universities in Belgrade and Novi Sad. The award for his teaching work arrived in 2005, by conferring to the Academician Karaman the title of Professor Emeritus of the University in Podgorica. He actively participated in the organization and work of the Speleological Association and societies in Montenegro for a number of years. He instructed young speleologists in biodiversity of the living world in caves and their value and importance both for the science and for Montenegro, and the need for their protection.
In 1988, he was elected as a member of the Montenegrin Academy of Science and Arts, and later also as the secretary of the Department of Natural Sciences of the same. Advocating, through the Montenegrin Academy of Science and Arts, the formation of the Natural History Museum of Montenegro, as an institution the activity of which should unite the scientific, educational, and cultural spheres of human perceptions and activities, he readily joined in the foundation of that institution, finally founded in 1995.
The Academician Karaman, in his fifty years of working engaged in science, has published around 260 scientific papers, described around 81 genera and over 200 new species and subspecies new to the science.
Gordan KARAMAN on AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY
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