Siniša Stanković (1892–1974) was a man who left a deep mark on the field of Serbian and European biological science with his scientific work. He was one of the founders of the ecological trend in biology, a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, a professor at the University of Belgrade, and an editor of scientific journals. Additionally, he held positions in various scientific societies. He was also a versatile politician and high-ranking official, serving as president of the Anti-Fascist Assembly of the People's Liberation of Serbia, president of the Presidium of the National Assembly of Serbia, and president of the Academic Council of Yugoslavia. He had a special love for music; he played the flute and was a member of the university chamber ensemble of the musical association Collegium Musicum.

Academician Siniša Stanković was born on March 26, 1892, in Zaječar to father Đorđe and mother Draga. He completed elementary school and the first two grades of high school in Negotin, and then in 1906 he moved to Belgrade, where he completed his high school education at the Third Belgrade High School in 1910. He continued his education at the University of Belgrade, where he studied zoology and botany. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he graduated, and after the outbreak of the World War, he interrupted his studies and joined the Serbian army as a volunteer of the Danube Artillery Regiment, and then from the end of 1914 he served in the Second Infantry Regiment "Knjaz Mihailo" (Iron Regiment). In the retreat of the Serbian army and civilians, he came to Thessaloniki via Lake Ohrid and the western part of Macedonia, and then to the island of Corfu, from where he was transferred to France in 1915 with a group of pupils and students. He continued his studies in France and in 1918 in Grenoble, under the professor of zoology Louis Léger, he passed the graduation exam and completed his studies. He continued his specialist studies in general and applied zoology at the Zoological Institute in Grenoble. He passed his doctoral exam in zoology at the University of Grenoble in June 1921. The topic of his doctoral thesis was the morphology and nutrition of juvenile cyprinids, the systematics and distribution of a new species of coccidia, a parasite of freshwater fish ("Etude sur la morphologie et la nutrition des alevins de poissons cyprinides - these principale; Systematique et repartition des Coccidies des poissons d'eau douce – these complementaire").

After returning to the country, he started working at the Zoological Institute of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade and joined the work of a group of scientific workers who studied the living world in our waters. Already in 1921, he was appointed to the position of assistant at the Zoological Institute. The following year, he was promoted to assistant professor, and within two years, he advanced to the position of associate professor. In 1934, he obtained the title of full professor of zoology, and on February 12 of the same year, he was elected a corresponding member of the Serbian Royal Academy. He was elected a regular member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences on March 2, 1946, on the proposal of Živojin Đorđević, Milutin Milanković, Ivan Đaja, Antun Bilimović, and Vojislav Mišković. After the Second World War, he was appointed as a full professor at the Faculty of Science and Mathematics and held regular university classes until 1962.

He was a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, a corresponding member of the University of Grenoble, the University of "St. Cyril and Methodius" in Skopje, the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Sciences of Bulgaria. He was an honorary doctor of the University of Grenoble and Nancy, as well as a corresponding member of the Academy of Nancy and the Masaryk Academy in Prague. He represented Yugoslavia in the International Society for Theoretical and Applied Limnology, served as vice-president of the International Limnological Society, and was a member of the editorial board of the most famous and oldest limnological journal, Archiv fur Hydrobiologie. He was also a member of the American Society for the Advancement of Science, the American Ecological Society, and the Zoological Society of France, Czechoslovakia, among others. He was the editor of special editions of the Institute of Ecology and Biogeography SAN, one of the founders of the Serbian Biological Society and its first president, and an honorary president of the Society of Ecologists of Yugoslavia. He was the chief and responsible editor of the journal Archives of Biological Sciences, the founder and first editor of the journal Ecology, and the editor-in-chief of the journal Dialektika. He worked intensively on the establishment of regular classes at the faculties, the organization of scientific work, and the establishment of scientific institutions. He contributed to the establishment of the Institute of Marine Biology in Kotor, the Institute of Biology on the Vranjina Peninsula on Lake Skadar, and the Institute of Biology at the Faculties of Science and Mathematics in Sarajevo, Novi Sad, and Pristina. After the Second World War, he gathered all the scientists of that time interested in contemporary developments in biology. Together with them, he fought against the isolation and confinement of faculties and institutes, advocating for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary connections. In this atmosphere and with this idea, the Institute of Ecology and Biogeography was formed on May 31, 1947, within the Serbian Academy of Sciences, whose first manager and long-term director was Prof. Siniša Stanković. The Institute of Ecology and Biogeography and the Institute of Developmental Physiology, Genetics, and Selection were merged in 1956 to create the Biological Institute, whose long-term director was also Prof. Stanković. In 1968, the Biological Institute first changed its name to the Institute for Biological Research, and in 1974, it received the current name "Siniša Stanković" Institute for Biological Research in honor of its founder and long-time director, the outstanding scientist and academician Professor Siniša Stanković.

The development of biological sciences in our country cannot be separated from the name of Prof. Siniša Stanković. His words, theoretical thought, way of defining scientific problems, and efforts to study life as a unique and indivisible whole were widely accepted and served as a guide for a wide circle of his followers and students. Prof. Stanković was a distinguished pedagogue, a prolific writer of textbooks and scientific papers, a popularizer of science, and one of the leading contributors to the post-war development of biological sciences in our country. We will single out the book "Oksvir Života," published in 1933, in which he presents the basic principles of ecology, visionary predicts today's problems, and expresses what the term "environment" implies in our country. This book, although popularly written, contains the fundamental principles of ecology as a scientific discipline. In the textbook "Ecology of Animals" (1962), which, in terms of its content, material, and writing style, goes far beyond the scope of a university textbook, Siniša Stanković presented the idea of gradual change in environmental conditions and communities along the river course (instead of the generally accepted theory about the division of water currents into sectors), which was published much later, in 1980, by American scientists as the famous "River Continuum Concept" - Vannote et al., (1980).