Oliver Jovanovic


Oliver Jovanovic is an instructor at Columbia University's Department of Microbiology and Immunology. He has worked as a game designer primarily on role-playing games. He was involved in the high-profile New York case People v. Jovanovic.

Career

Oliver Jovanovic was developing a new version of the role-playing game RuneQuest for Avalon Hill, and was the lead author of the RuneQuest: Adventures in Glorantha line in 1996. Eric Dott, chairman of Avalon Hill, noted that Jovanovic's version of RuneQuest had not been published because the developers repeatedly missed deadlines.
Jovanovic graduated from the University of Chicago, and then obtained a Ph.D. in microbiology from Columbia in May 2002. He works at Columbia's Department of Microbiology and Immunology as Instructor and Director of Bioinformatics & Information Technology.

People v. Jovanovic

In 1996, Oliver Jovanovic was accused of sadomasochistic torture of a woman whom he had met shortly before on the Internet. He was convicted but later freed on appeal. On December 20, 1999, Jovanovic was released from prison when the New York appeals court ruled in a 3-to-1 decision, and in a 40-page majority opinion by Appellate Justice David Saxe, that the state's rape shield law had been misapplied by the judge in charge of the case. The case was dismissed with prejudice. Jovanovic sued the City of New York for $10 million for prosecutorial misconduct, but the case was dismissed in 2010.