And now, that window has gotten even larger. Pesich, a Sunnyvale resident and a staff scientist at Stanford University, has just won $4,000 as part of an Artist Fellowship from Arts Council Silicon Valley. Pesich, 38, plans to use the money to further explore his professional interests--both of them.

"You can find science in forms of poetry, and forms of poetry in science," he says. "Both are trying to answer the question of who we are."

Pesich discovered his appreciation for literature first. As the child of Serbian immigrants who immigrated to the United States, he received encouragement to read from his mother. "We used to have a reading hour every afternoon. My mother wanted us to learn the language and cultivate an appreciation for literature, but we also had asthma, and she wanted to keep us from running around," he says.

But on a childhood trip to the campus of his future employer, Pesich picked up a book on genetics, and his love for science took root. While attending college at UC-Davis, Pesich chose molecular genetics as his major, recalling advice he had received from his mother, who was a nurse. "She had wanted to be a journalist, but her father said that medicine was a better choice because there's always a need for nurses. He wanted to make sure she could feed herself," he says.

Even though his major studies were in the science department, Pesich stayed involved with the literary scene as an undergraduate. He even helped found the literary publication Up!

After college his involvement with the literary scene continued when he moved back to the Bay Area. Pesich is vice president of the board of directors at Poetry Center San José, and he's the poetry editor with The Montserrat Review, a literary journal based in Mountain View.

Pesich's full-time job involves aiding the research of post-doctoral fellows and the principal investigators of various scientific studies. But over time, he started to move beyond simply appreciating literature and instead tried his hand at writing poetry. He credits a former teacher, Richard Canavese at Fremont High School, with turning him onto the possibility of writing. "I sometimes use it to criticize science," he says, "but you'll also come across a research paper that presents information in a useful metaphor."

His friend and collaborator Michael Vaughn says that confluence of interests is Pesich's strength. "Rob's science is always slipping into his work on a more direct basis," Vaughn says. "He wrote a chilling poem on animal testing, comparing the work he was then doing with a hawk he spied from his lab window."

Vaughn, a novelist who currently lives in Tacoma, Wash., has based characters in his own writing on Pesich. The two have even compiled a poem from lines swapped while they were playing pool--titled "Break." "Neither one of us can remember who wrote which lines!" Vaughn says.

Those poems gathered over the years. After years of writing, Pesich published a collection in 2001 with Dragonfly Press in Mountain View. The poems share a common thread of the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, from which his parents escaped. While visiting their native Serbia, Pesich developed an appreciation for Serbian poetry.

Serbia is also where Pesich met his wife, who used to run a language school there. "One of my relatives decided that he wanted to introduce me to his English teacher. I thought she would be older and married, so I was a little surprised when Sanja walked through the door," he says. "When we met, we spoke about Blake, and I just got that feeling."

The couple married twice for good measure--once in June 2003 in the United States and again that September in Serbia. Their son, Nikola, was born this past November.

Their next production will be in the literary realm and will likely come from his grant money, which he hopes to use for translating Serbian poets such as Miroljub Todorovic and Branko Miljkovic into English. Pesich applied for the grant, and though he has won similar honors in the past, says he was surprised to win the award. "I'm very honored--there are a lot of good things going on in the poetry community," he says.

Diem Jones, the director of programs for Arts Council Silicon Valley, was involved with Pesich's selection as one of the two poets receiving the award. "Robert has arrived at a plateau in his poetic career and is clearly an emerging force in the field, as his poetry inspires reflective thought and is without boundaries," Jones says.

That includes international boundaries, as evidenced by Pesich's Serbian focus. He does speak a bit of Serbian, which should help with the translating, but he says his skills are trumped by his wife's. "It's difficult for me--I have a long way to go to get by," he says. His parents, who still live in Sunnyvale, also speak Serbian, but they also poke a little fun at their son's pastime.

"They're very concerned for me," Pesich says with a laugh. After all, it was their influence that pushed Pesich into a scientific career, but that push has benefited Pesich in many ways, including his writing. "I distinctly remember this lime green microscope that my parents got for us. It offered this fantastic window into other worlds," he says.