He received a B.A. from Boston University and a Ph.D. from Brown University. His resarch is in algebraic topology, and more specifically in applications of calculus of functors to spaces of embeddings and immersions. He is the author of over thirty articles and two books and has delivered more than two hundred lectures in some twenty countries. He was a visiting professor at MIT, Louvain-la-Neuve University, and the University of Virginia.
Professor Volić was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and came to the U.S. in 1991 to attend his senior year of high school. Soon after he arrived, a war broke out in his country and he has lived in the U.S. ever since. He now travels to Bosnia-Herzegovina frequently through his involvement in various education and research activities, including advising Ph.D. students and working with government agencies to bring quality STEM education to the country. In 2018, he spent a semester at the University of Sarajevo as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar.
Professor Volić likes to teach across the undergraduate math curriculum, advise student research, and advocates for mathematics as a relevant and vibrant discipline. He has recently started a number of initiatives aimed at improving education on the role of mathematics in politics, and is teaching a class on this topic at Wellesley in spring 2020.
