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Jan T. Vilek M.D., Ph.D. is a biomedical scientist, educator, inventor and philanthropist. He is a professor in the Department of Microbiology at the New York University School of Medicine and President of The Vilcek Foundation. Vilek, a native of Bratislava, Slovakia, received his M.D. degree from Comenius University Medical School, Bratislava in 1957 and his Ph.D. in Virology from the Institute of Virology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1962. In 1964, Jan Vilek, with his wife Marica, defected from Communist Czechoslovakia during a threeday visit to Vienna. In 1965, the Vileks immigrated to the United States, and have since lived in New York City. Vilek devoted his scientific career to studies of soluble mediators that regulate the immune system , including interferon and tumor necrosis factor .

Vilcek was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, to a middle class secular Jewish family. His mother, Friderika Fischer, was born to a Germanspeaking family in Budapest, Hungary. She moved with her family to Bratislava where she finished medical school, married Jans father, Julius Vilcek, and became an ophthalmologist. Jan Vilcek grew up speaking three languages . During the Second World War, his family was persecuted because of their Jewish heritage. To protect him from deportation to a concentration camp, in 1942 his parents placed Vilcek in an orphanage run by Catholic nuns. From mid1944 through the end of the war in 1945, Jan Vilcek and his mother were hidden by a brave Slovak family in a remote village, while his father joined an uprising against the Nazis. After the defeat of Nazi Germany the family was reunited and moved back to Bratislava.

Source: Wikipedia