Irena Pavlova is EU Projects Manager at GATE – Big Data Centre of Excellence at Sofia University. She leads the initiation, organisation and implementation of GATE’s research projects under various EU and national programmеs. She is also involved in the establishment of the Bulgaria Urban Data Space. Irena is also an Assistant Professor at Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Sofia University, specialized in software engineering and data interoperability. Previously, Irena has been working in industry, managing and conducting research and development in more than 30 industrial and EU funded projects. Research interests include Data Spaces, Data Management and enrichment, data interoperability.

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Dr. Dimitar Georgiev is the chief ideologist and Head of Clinical Research at the Institute for Medical Research, Bulgaria. He has more than 20 years of crucial expertise in management, consulting and performing various activities in healthcare and life sciences – clinical trials for the development and approval of pharmaceutical products, collection and storage of umbilical cord blood stem cells, introduction of products and performance of services for laboratory and genetic testing, forensics, pharmaco- and cosmetic vigilance in Bulgaria, structured funding for innovative projects, prenatal and companion diagnostics (direct-to-consumer testing), digital health and therapeutics, etc. Besides being a Bulgarian biotech entrepreneur, Dr. Georgiev is also one of the pioneers in the field of personalized medicine in the country. He is one of the founding members of the Bulgarian Association for Personalized Medicine (BAPEMED), and he actively participates in different projects and activities of the Association. Dr.Georgiev has been a Principal Investigator in several clinical trials and validation studies related to numerous therapeutic areas: women’s health, oncology, infectious diseases, etc. He has also taken part in the design and development of many projects as a medical and scientific advisor. Currently, he is one of the experts on behalf of BAPEMED who participates in the Screen4Care project: shortening the path to rare disease diagnosis by using newborn genetic screening and digital technologies. The project includes 35 partners and will run for five years, with a total budget of €25 million provided by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI 2 JU) – a joint undertaking of the European Union and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).

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Ivan Goychev is a technology leader with 20+ years of experience in IT solutions for finance, air travel, cloud and construction industries. In his role as CTO, he led the technical team in two BG startups that successfully evolved into international enterprise businesses. He has worked as a manager in Amazon AWS with teams on three continents and is keen on talking about leadership principles and operational excellence practices. Currently, Ivan is the CTO at CoBuilder, where he works on developing a global platform for exchanging structured data for construction projects with the goal of achieving a greener construction industry. In his free time, he also contributes to Podkrepi.bg – a transparent open-source donation platform that all volunteers can develop and improve together.

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Alex is a seasoned engineer with 20+ years of experience across various enterprises and business domains. Currently, he is the head of engineering and site lead of HALO Diagnostics in Bulgaria, where he is working on improving patient outcomes by putting more capable and usable software in the hands of medical staff.

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