Third Youth Scientific Session
Biomedicine and Quality of Life

Dr. Rumiana Bakalova

Rumiana Bakalova obtained her PhD and Doctor-of-Science (DSci) degrees at Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (Bulgaria). She is a scientist with over 25-year experience in experimental imaging diagnostics and therapy of cancer, atherosclerosis, and neurodegeneration. Her main scientific interests are in the field of molecular imaging, molecular probe design, drug delivery systems, and nanomedicine. Recent studies are focused on redox-imaging and image-guided redox-modulation in cancer, as well as in nanotheranostics. Her scientific career is developing in Bulgaria and Japan. She has won several prestigious academic awards from Bulgarian, Japanese, and US institutions.

Dr. Neus Colomina Gabarrella

Dr. Neus Colomina Gabarrella is an Associate professor at Universitat de Lleida. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She defended her PhD in Biology based on her work on the regulation of the cell cycle in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae under nutrient deprivation conditions. Dr. Neus Colomina Gabarella worked as a post-doc in Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry (1999-2001) and in Universitat de Lleida (2001-2004). She obtained a research contract (Ramón y Cajal program) and used two different models, budding yeast and mammalian cell lines, to study the control of the G1-S phase transition in the cell cycle at Universitat de Lleida. As of 2010 she is an associate professor at Universitat de Lleida and researcher at Institut de Recerca Biomèdica de Lleida (IRBLleida). She joined the project led by Dr. Jordi Torres, where she studies the role of the Smc5/6 complex in genome stability both in budding yeast and human cells.

Dr. Vladimir Bozhilov

Dr. Vladimir Bozhilov is Associate Professor at the Department of Astronomy at the Faculty of Physics at Sofia University “St. Kl. Ohridski”, Bulgaria. Dr. Bozhilov holds a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics, his main scientific interests are active galactic nuclei (AGN), cosmology and the search for life beyond Earth. He teaches the M.Sc. Courses “Science communication in Astronomy” and “Practical Science Communication in Astronomy” in the innovative interdisciplinary Master program “Astronomy and Popularization of Astronomy” at the Faculty of Physics, University of Sofia. Dr. Bozhilov is a Horizon 2020 National Contact Point for the “Science with and for Society” Programme since February 2017 and since October 2018 also serves as Public Relations Expert at the Bulgarian National Science Fund.

Besides being an active scientist and a lecturer, Dr. Bozhilov is an active and well known science communicator. He won second prize in the FameLab 2010 competition for communicating popular science and first prize in Hall of FameLab International 2014 in London, UK. He is a frequent guest in radio and TV shows and presenter in sci-comm events (like Sofia Science Festival, European Researchers Night, RACIO, ScienceBricks etc.), where he shares his passion for Space and gives insights about the latest scientific discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics to layman audience. Dr. Bozhilov is Lecturer and Science Expert at Children's Science Center “Muzeiko” since its foundation in 2015. In 2012-2018 he was the Science Editor and then the Editor-in-Chief for “BBC Knowledge Bulgaria/BBC FOCUS/ScienceWorld” magazine.

Deyana Ivanova

Deyana Ivanova obtained her Master’s degree in Biochemistry at Queen Mary University London (UK) in 2017. Afterwards she began her PhD in the department of Women and Children's Health at King’s College London, which is currently ongoing. Her main research interests are in the field of reproductive neuroendocrinology. She is investigating how psychological stress delays puberty in female mice, the long-term consequences into adulthood while interrogating the underlying neural mechanisms.

Dr. Plamen Ivanov

Professor Ivanov, PhD, DSc, is Director of the Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology at Boston University, Associate Physiologist at the Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has introduced innovative ways to analyze and model physiologic systems, adapting and developing concepts and methods from modern statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics and networks theory. He has investigated the complex dynamics and underlying control mechanisms of a range of physiological systems, including studies on cardiac and respiratory dynamics, sleep-stage transitions, circadian rhythms, locomotion and brain dynamics, and has uncovered basic laws of physiologic regulation. His work is published in more than 150 publications and book chapters (H-index=60; 26,700 citations), and has been broadly featured in the media, including Scientific American, Science News, Physics World, Nature Research Highlights, Washington Post, Futurity Magazine, the Boston Globe. Professor Ivanov has pioneered the study of dynamical network interactions of physiological and organ systems, and is the originator and founder of the field of Network Physiology. His current work focuses on developing theoretical framework to investigate network interactions among diverse organ systems, and how physiological systems integrate to generate distinct states and functions at the organism level to produce health or disease. His work lays the foundation of the Human Physiolome, a new type of BigData, containing streams of continuously recording, high frequency, synchronized physiological signals under various physiological states and clinical conditions, with an associated Atlas of network maps representing network interactions among physiological systems at different levels in the human organism. Professor Ivanov is one of the nine founding members of PhysioNet — first NIH sponsored data sharing research resource. His research has been funded by the W.M. Keck Foundation, NIH, Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). He has served as editorial and advisory board member for several leading journals, including EPL (Europhysics Letters), EPJ Nonlinear Biomedical Physics, Journal of Biological Physics (JOBP), Physiological Measurement, New Journal of Physics. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Frontiers in Fractal and Network Physiology, and is the founding director of the International Summer Institute on Network Physiology (ISINP), Lake Como School of Advanced Study. Professor Ivanov is Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (2010). He is recipient of the Sustained Research Excellence Award (2009-2011) of the Biomedical Research Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School; of the Georgi Nadjakov Medal, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (2012), and of the Pythagoras Award for high achievements in interdisciplinary research bestowed by the Ministry of Education and Science of Bulgaria (2014).

Dr. Rumiana Dimova

Rumiana Dimova obtained her PhD at Bordeaux University (France) in 1999. Afterwards she joined the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (Germany) as a postdoctoral fellow, where she became a group leader in 2000 establishing the Biophysics Lab. Her main research interests are in the field of membrane biophysics. She has been tackling a variety of open questions in cell membrane biophysics and synthetic biology while employing giant vesicles as a platform to develop new methods for the biophysical characterization of membranes and processes involving them. In 2014, she was awarded with the Emmy Noether Distinction for Women in Physics of the European Physical Society, and in 2021 she received the Liesegang Prize of the German Colloid Society.

Dr. Anela Ivanova

Anela Ivanova was awarded a PhD in Physical Chemistry by Sofia University in 2004. Since then she has been employed at the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy of Sofia University and since 2018 headed the Laboratory for Quantum and Computational Chemistry. Her research is in the field of applied computational chemistry with focus on simulations of the structure and function of biomolecular assemblies. Most recently, components of biocompatible peptide-based drug delivery systems have been described by atomistic molecular dynamics to gain insight into their structure and intermolecular interactions in physiological milieu. Anela Ivanova was a Humboldt fellow at the Technical University Munich, Germany (2006-2007) and a Marie Curie fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, Germany (2001-2002).

Dr. Krasimira Tsaneva

Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova earned her undergraduate and MSc degrees in mathematics at the University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria from 1991 until 1996. In September 2001 she started a PhD in applied mathematics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. After completing her PhD in October 2004 she spent 18 months as a post- doctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Biological Modelling, National Institutes of Health, USA and another 15 months as a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Biology at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France. She joined the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol in October 2007 as a lecturer and was promoted to a Reader in Applied Mathematics in 2012. She moved to the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter (UoE) in July 2013 where she is currently a Professor of Mathematics for Healthcare. She is Associate Dean for Global in the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Director of the EPSRC Hub for Quantitative Modelling in Healthcare (EP/T017856/1, 2021-2015), Co-director of the University of Exeter ISSF (a £4.8M initiative between UoE and the Wellcome Trust) and an Alan Turing Institute Fellow since October 2018. Her research and professional activities aim to inform novel applications of mathematics to enable the development of quantitative methods for healthcare and healthcare technologies.

Dr. Raffaele Gravina

Raffaele Gravina is tenured Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at the Dept of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics, and Systems of the University of Calabria (Unical), Italy. He received a PhD in Computer Engineering from Unical in 2012. Since 2020, he has the Italian ASN (Scientific National Habilitation) for Full Professor. Previously, he was researcher at the WSN Lab in Berkeley, CA. He is young visiting scientist at SIAT – Shenzhen. His research interests include Wearable Computing, physiological signal processing, and Internet-of-Things. He is author of 80+ papers in int’l journals, conferences and books. He is cofounder of SenSysCal S.r.l., a Unical spinoff focused on innovative IoT systems. He is associate editor of Information Fusion and Smart Health journals and editorial board member of Sensors. He is also associate member of the Technical Committee on Wearable Biomedical Sensors and Systems (IEEE EMB Society). He is member of IEEE and IEEE SMC Society.

Milena Petkova

Milena Petkova is an executive director of Karoll Knowledge Foundation since its establishment in 2018. Prior to that, she served as a knowledge manager of Karoll Financial Group and project manager of Karoll Corporate University. She develops the design of trainings, without analogue in our country, which brought her the nomination of uchi.bg for Innovator in Education in 2015. Prior to joining Karoll financial group, she was an HR Manager, Selection Manager and Consultant.

She has worked as a journalist for many years – as the first deputy editor-in-chief of Pari daily newspaper and also as an author and host of the daily business program of Darik Radio "Portfolio".

She has a master's degree in Journalism from Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski ”, International Relations from the University of National and World Economy and Management and Development of Human Resources from the School of Management at New Bulgarian University. She continues her development with various certification trainings.

Dr. Justine Toms

Justine Toms is among the pioneers of the Bulgarian Internet. An expert in online media and marketing, as of the end of 1990s, blogger, entrepreneur, online media and marketing consultant, public speaker, university lecturer (New Bulgarian University, SoftUni), and author of about 20 books.

Justine is the founder and business development manager of the digital agency ABC Design & Communication, creator of a number of niche online websites in Bulgaria. The development of Bulgarian web also owes much to her due to the contests "BG Site" (1999 – 2014) and "Site of the Year" (2018 – ).

Among the books she has authored or coauthored are: "Leaders for a New Beginning", "Social Responsibility of Businsess: Communications and Practices", "Corporate Social Responsibility and Communications for Sustainable Business Development", "Foundations of a Successful Business Here and Now", "Social Network Instruments: Marketing in the Web 2.0 Era".

Dr. Nikola Kerekov

Nikola Kerekov holds a bachelor degree in Molecular biology, master degree in Cell biology and pathology from Sofia University St.Kliment Ohridski. He has 11 years of scientific experience working in the field of autoimmunity, DNA vaccines and development of humanized animal models of human diseases. He has a Ph.D. in Experimental immunology from the Institute of Microbiology, Bulgarian Academy of sciences. At the moment, Nikola is a member of the team behind Ratio – science outreach platform, doing various initiatives to present science, engineering and technologies in easy to understand everyday language. His main role at Ratio is the selection of topics and communications with speakers and also organizing different science outreach events. He himself is an experienced science communicator, being main speaker on many public events, doing short educational clips for the social media and a main character in the popular science podcast Ratio Weekly.