As a 12-year-old, Lois and her two siblings helped care for her invalid father until he died of diabetes at 51. She vowed then to become a doctor and to find a cure.
“I saw death and dying as a child,” she once recalled.
Years later, Dr. Jovanovic, after 29 weeks of pregnancy, gave birth to a child, her second, with severe cerebral palsy. (The infant spent three months on a respirator.) Within 24 hours of the delivery, doctors discovered that Dr. Jovanovic, too, had Type 1 diabetes.
She survived to become a tenacious research endocrinologist. And if she did not find a cure for diabetes as she had pledged to do as a child, she redeemed that vow in part with her success in helping diabetic women have children.
Lois Gretchen Blaustone was born on May 2, 1947, in Minneapolis. Her father, Arnold, was a neuropsychiatrist; her mother, Alice (Dechter) Blaustone, was a homemaker.
Dr. Jovanovic earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Columbia University and a master’s in Hebrew literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She earned her medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and completed her residency and fellowship in internal medicine, endocrinology and metabolism at New York Hospital-Cornell, in Manhattan.
There she was a principal investigator for studies that found that by strictly regulating their glucose level, women could radically reduce the risks of complications during pregnancy and birth.
Dr. Jovanovic is survived by her two children, Dr. Larisa Taylor and Dr. Kevin Jovanovic, both specialists in obstetrics and gynecology; and four grandchildren. Her marriage to Dr. Radoslav Jovanovic, an obstetrician and gynecologist who works with his son in Manhattan, ended in divorce.
