Maria Muntañola Cvetković

In this Catalan name, the first or paternal surname is Muntañola and the second or maternal family name is Inglada; both are generally joined by the conjunction "i".

Maria Muntañola Cvetković
Born	Maria Muntañola i Inglada (1923-08-26)26 August 1923 Gràcia, Barcelona, Spain
Died	7 January 2021(2021-01-07) (aged 97) Belgrade, Serbia
Occupation	Mycologist
Spouses	Francisco de Asis Monrós Slobodan Cvetković ​ (died 2021)​
Children	2
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship (1952)
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Buenos Aires Sorbonne University
Doctoral advisor	Georges Viennot-Bourgein
Academic work
Discipline	Mycology
Institutions	University of Belgrade University of Novi Sad

Maria Muntañola Cvetković (née Muntañola i Inglada; 26 August 1923 – 7 January 2021) was a Spanish mycologist based in Serbia. After fleeing to Argentina due to the Spanish Civil War, she obtained her degrees from the University of Buenos Aires and Sorbonne University and moved to Belgrade, where she worked as a professor at the University of Novi Sad and became a full professor at the University of Belgrade. A 1952 Guggenheim Fellow, she became one of Serbia's first microfungi experts, described eight species of ascomycetes and was the first president of the Mycological Society of Serbia.

Biography

Early life and career

Maria Muntañola i Inglada was born on 26 August 1923 in Gràcia, a district in northwestern Barcelona. Her parents were Montserrat (née Inglada) and Francesc Muntañola i Puig, who owned a timber warehouse and was mayor of L'Ametlla del Vallès for two months in 1939. The family fled Spain in 1939 due to the Spanish Civil War, and she graduated from a high school in Buenos Aires and obtained her agronomist-engineer degree from the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Agronomy and Veterinary Sciences.

Becoming interested in mycology due to her interest in plants, she toured northern South America, Panama, and the Cuba for her first research project, focusing on phytopathogenic fungi, and she became a teacher at the Instituto Miguel Lillo in the National University of Tucumán (UNT). She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952. Following an early career in Argentina, she later moved to Paris, where she obtained her PhD in 1958 at Sorbonne University; her dissertation was supervised by Georges Viennot-Bourgein.

Academic career in Europe

She later moved to Belgrade, where she worked as a professor at the University of Novi Sad and University of Belgrade, serving as full professor at the latter from 1989 until 1996. She also started the mycological laboratory of the Institute for Biological Research "Siniša Stanković" and worked there as their scientific advisor. In 1983, she went to the University of Baghdad as a visiting professor during the Ba'athist Iraq era. Due to the Yugoslav Wars, her research access to foreign funding was restricted and she received her salary and retirement pension in checks of varying cashability. She was reportedly the only mycologist to be a professor of mycology, with Xavier Llimona noting that other mycologists would instead have botany, dermatology, microbiology, or phytopathology in their professor titles if working in Spain.

She became one of Yugoslavia's first microfungi experts and also specialized in phytopathology, with her contributions to the latter field including improvements to public nutrition with her studies on the prevalence and prevention of fungal crop diseases. She had published over seventy academic articles and described eight species of ascomycetes. In the 1980s, she wrote the mycology textbook Opsta mikologija, which achieved widespread usage in Serbia and was also the first Serbian-language "comprehensive presentation of the fungi kingdom", before later being translated to Spanish and Catalan. She also became honorary member of the Spanish Association of Mycology in 1988, as well as the first president of the Mycological Society of Serbia.

Personal life

Her first husband was Francisco de Asis Monrós, an entomologist who was also a fellow UNT academic. After her husband's death in 1958, she married Slobodan Cvetković, an engineer from Serbia whom she met while studying in France. Her children were translator Silvia Monrós-Stojakovic and pulmonologist Alexàndar Monrós.

She also learned to speak Serbo-Croatian while she was in Belgrade, described her as "the universal Serbo-Catalan". However, she still kept a Spanish passport even after she moved to Serbia, and she often did academic work in her native Catalonia, with examples including her lectures in fungal phytopathology and her research on fungi in local boxwood.

She died on 7 January 2021 in Belgrade, aged 87.

Bibliography

• Muntañola-Cvetković, Maria (1987). Opšta mikologija (in Serbian). Belgrade: Književne novine.
• Muntañola-Cvetković, Maria (1990). Opšta mikologija (in Serbian). Belgrade: Naučna knjiga.