Government meets the Business Forum: What's on the Horizon for 2024

Academician Nikolai Denkov

Prime Minister of the Republic of Bulgaria

Nikolai Denkov is an academician of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) (2021) and an ordinary member of the Academia Europaea (MAE) (2019), professor and doctor of science (physical chemistry). He is a member of the Physical Sciences Expert Group at the European Space Agency (ESA). Head of the Active Formulations and Materials Laboratory at the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy of the Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski".

Academician Nikolai Denkov ranks in the 1% world’s most influential scientists in his field. His research is devoted to the physical chemistry of the colloidal dispersions, surfactants and their numerous applications. His publications comprise over 175 science articles of which two were printed in the prestigious journal Nature while Nature Physics and Nature Communications carried one article each; to these 18 reviews are to be added.

Academician Nikolai Denkov’s contributions have been cited 9500 times in research publications (h-index = 50). He has delivered over 90 lectures at international conferences; he has conducted over 80 seminars at universities and research institutes outside Bulgaria. He is the co-author of 12 patents, including six international and four foreign patents.

Academician Nikolai Denkov has been the manager of over 45 international projects financed by foreign companies.

He has worked as a visiting researcher at the Japan R&D Foundation (JRDC), a senior researcher at the institute of the company Rhône-Poulenc (France), a lead researcher at the Unilever’s research institute (USA). He has been a visiting professor at the ESPCI-Paris (City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution) and at the University of Lille (France).

Academician Nikolai Denkov’s scientific achievements have brought him a number of prestigious awards: the Solvay Prize (European Colloid and Interface Society/ECIS); the Lectureship Award of the Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ), (Colloid and Interface Section); the Pythagoras National Award of Bulgaria’s Ministry of Education and Science.

From 2014 to 2016 Academician Nikolai Denkov was Deputy Minister of Education and Science with portfolios university education and European Structural Funds. In 2017 and 2021 he was Minister of Education and Science in Caretaker Governments. In 2021-2022, he was Minister of Education and Science as member of Kiril Petkov’s cabinet following parliamentary elections.

Member of Parliament (the 48th and the 49th National Assembly), elected by the 30th Multi-seat Constituency, Shoumen.

Mariya Gabriel

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs

Mariya Gabriel was born on 20 May 1979 in Gotse Delchev, Bulgaria. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in ‘Bulgarian and French Philology’ at the Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv (in 2001). She graduated with a Master’s degree in Comparative Politics and International Relations at the Doctoral Academy of Political Science, Bordeaux in 2003. From 2004 to 2008 she was a research assistant at the Bordeaux Institute of Political Studies, France.

Mariya Gabriel was elected three times as Member of the European Parliament – in 2009, 2014 and 2019. She engaged actively in the work of the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, the Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality. Between 2014 and 2017 she was Vice-Chair of the EPP Group in the European Parliament. She is a two-time winner of the prestigious MEP of the Year Award. She is the first Vice-President of the European People’s Party (EPP) and Vice-President of EPP Women.

From July 2017 until November 2019, Mariya Gabriel was European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society. Her main areas of work were on digital skills, the European Artificial Intelligence Strategy, the Digital Europe programme, the fight against disinformation and fake news, and high-performance computing technologies.

From December 2019 until 10 May 2023, Mariya Gabriel was European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth. Under her leadership the Horizon Europe, Erasmus+ and Creative Europe programmes achieved an unprecedented budget for the period 2021-2027 and put at the forefront new European initiatives, among which are the roll out of the European Universities Alliances, the New European Innovation Agenda, the role of young researchers in the European Research Area, unlocking the potential of the cultural and creative sectors in Europe, and the European Year of Youth 2022. She led the work on making the European Education Area a reality by 2025.

Mariya Gabriel has been the recipient of numerous European and international awards: the Annual Award of the Vienna Economic Forum "Partner of the Year 2020" for her contribution to economic development; the Technovisionaire Award for Excellence in Research, Technology, Innovation and Business; the ENTREPS International Board of Sustainable Businesses and Global Innovation Award; the "Tech.eu" leadership award in support of startups and the innovation ecosystems in Europe; the award "Donna é Innovazione". In 2022, the leading news site EU-Startups.com ranked her among the ‘Top 100 most influential women in Europe in the startup and venture capital space’.

Ivan Krastev

Political scientist, Head of the Center for Liberal Strategies and researcher at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences in Vienna

Bogdan Bogdanov

Minister of Economy and Industry

Bogdan Bogdanov holds a Bachelor’s Degree in finance from the Higher School of Insurance and Finance and a Master’s Degree in European business and finance from the University of National and World Economy and the Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom. He has been a specialist in business development and structuring of investment projects for over 10 years. He has worked for Bulgarian and foreign companies with a focus on research and development and high added value industries.

Julian Popov

Minister of Environment and Water

Julian Popov is a fellow at the European Climate Foundation, Chairman of the Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE) and an ex Minister of Environment of Bulgaria as a member of a caretaker government. He has been a goodwill ambassador of Bulgaria for energy and climate policy and an energy security adviser to the President of Bulgaria.

Julian Popov is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, of the Climate-KIC Advisory Council and of several other energy- and climate-related organizations. He is one of the founders and currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the New Bulgarian University and a co-founder of the Tunisian School of Politics. Julian Popov has been recognized twice by the EurActiv as one of the 40 most influential voices in European energy policies. Financial Times, Project Syndicate, NS Energy Monitor, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, EurActiv and many other have carried his articles on climate and energy policy.
Author of two books and co-author of the books "The European Supergrid" and "Energy and Climate Diplomacy".

prof. Dr. Luc Van Gool

Professor at INSAIT and ETH Zurich, the most cited European scientist in AI (> 200,000), co-founder of 12 deep-tech companies

Luc Van Gool is a Full Professor at ETH Zurich since the fall of 1998. He is head of the Computer Vision Laboratory.

He was born on the 18th of april 1959 and studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Leuven in Belgium. In 1991 he got his PhD degree from the same university, with a dissertation on the use of invariance in computer vision. In 1991 he became an assistant professor in Leuven and in 1996 professor. He still leads a research group in Leuven, that focuses on industrial applications of computer vision. In 1998 he became a full professor at the ETH in Zuerich, where he now also is the head of the Computer Vision group at the department of Electrical Engineering.

With his research teams, Luc Van Gool is a partner in several national and international projects, e.g. the EU ACTS project Vanguard, the EU Esprit projects Improofs and Impact, and the EU Brite-​Euram project Soquetec. He is also involved in several other projects, that range from fundamental research to application-​driven developments. His major research interests include 2D and 3D object recognition, texture analysis, range acquisition, stereo vision, robot vision, and optical flow.

Luc Van Gool has been a member of the program committees of several leading international conferences, including the ICCV, ECCV, and CVPR. In 1998 he received a David Marr Prize at the International Conference on Computer Vision.

He is also a cofounder and director of the company Eyetronics, that specialises on 3D modeling and animation, mainly for the entertainment industry and medical applications. The "ShapeSnatcher' product received one of the EU "EITP" prizes.in 1998.

Prof. Dr. Martin Vechev

Creator and architect of INSAIT, professor at ETH Zurich, co-founder of 3 deep-tech companies

Martin Vechev is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich working in the fields of programming languages, machine learning, and security. He leads the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab (SRI), part of the Department of Computer Science. He is known for his pioneering works in machine learning for code (BigCode), where he introduced statistical programming engines trained on large codebases, reliable and trustworthy artificial intelligence, where he introduced abstract interpretation methods for reasoning about deep neural networks to enable the verification of large machine learning models, and quantum programming, introducing the first high-level programming language and system Silq.

Vechev has received the ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award in 2019 and a highly-visible ERC Starting Grant, which helped shape the area of machine learning for code. In 2016, his Ph.D. student Veselin Raychev received an Honorable Mention for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and in 2021 his Ph.D. student Gagandeep Singh received the ACM SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Vechev has also co-founded the deep tech start-ups LatticeFlow, DeepCode, and ChainSecurity.

Ideologist of INSAIT - Institute of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Technology.

Milena Stoycheva

Minister of Innovation and Growth

Milena Stoycheva was born in 1967 in Varna, Bulgaria. She is a long-time CEO of Junior Achievement Bulgaria (JA Bulgaria), part of the global network of Junior Achievement Worldwide (JA Worldwide). Throughout her career, Stoycheva has worked systematically for digitalization, modernization and development of a high educational and startup culture in Bulgaria.

She taught innovation and entrepreneurship at the European Institute of Innovation and Technology and was responsible for the innovation and transformation strategy at EIT Culture & Creativity.

She is the recipient of JA Worldwide's highest global leadership award "Soraya Salti" for 2021, presented in recognition of making a social impact through economic empowerment.

Stoycheva has more than 20 years of experience in leadership positions in international organizations and companies, having also served as the Chair of the Global Member Council of JA Worldwide and Senior Adviser on Higher Education for Europe.

She is the first Dean of Student Affairs at the American University in Bulgaria. Stoycheva is a member of the board of the European Female Founders and works actively for affirming women in business, science and entrepreneurship.

She is a co-founder of the Bulgarian cluster for digital solutions and innovations in healthcare and is its first chairperson. Stoycheva participated in several expert groups at the EC, OECD, HEinnovate, etc.

She has degrees and specializations from Bulgarian and international universities such as Sofia University "Kliment Ohridski", Penn State University, UC Berkeley and MIT.

Agis Digkas

Executive Vice President of Greece’s Renewable Energy Sources Operator (DAPEEP SA)

Agis Digkas serves as Executive Vice President of Greece’s Renewable Energy Sources Operator. The company is the largest shareholder in the Hellenic Energy Exchange (HEnEx) and the auctioneer of the CO2 Emissions Allowances in Greece. In this capacity, he is actively involved in the strategic development of Greece’s Renewable Energy Market, increasing penetration and ensuring sustainability of existing and new RES & CHP investments. He represents the company to European & International Institutions, strengthening government’s effort to tackle climate change and its consequences. Prior to this, Agis worked as an energy consultant with a demonstrated history in both private and public sector. He studied Mechanical Engineering at National Technical University of Athens and holds an MBA and a PhD in "Decision Support Systems & Systemic Risk Analysis" from University of Athens.

Krasimir Nenov

Deputy Minister of Еnergy

Krassimir Nenov has many years of managerial experience in the energy sector, most recently serving as the executive director of "Contourglobal Maritsa Iztok 3" AD in the period from 2017 to 2023. He also worked for one of the largest energy companies - the Italian "Enel". He holds a master's degree in "Business Administration" from two universities - the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium and Cornell University, USA. He also graduated in economics from the University of Arkansas, USA.

Georgi Klisurski

Deputy Minister of Finance

Georgi Klisurski holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard University in the United States, holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA) and a major in Finance from the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania.

During the term of office of the government of Kiril Petkov he was an adviser to the Deputy Prime Minister for European Funds and Minister of Finance Assen Vassilev. He has experience as an economist in the field of mergers and acquisitions of companies, in accordance with the competition law in the European Union and the United States. He has worked as a manager at the global financial platform for online payments PayPal. From August 2022 to March 2023 he was Chairman of the Board of Directors of Bulgaria Heli Med Services EAD, the first Bulgarian state-owned company entrusted with the operation of helicopter emergency flights. 

He is fluent in English and German.

Milena Dragijska

CEO, Lidl Bulgaria

Milena Dragijska has been managing Lidl Bulgaria since 2007, when the chain started on the Bulgarian market. Her career in Lidl Germany began as a regional sales manager for the Stuttgart and Karlsruhe regions, then she continued her professional development at the headquarters of Lidl, where she was responsible for various international projects for Lidl International.
She is a member of the Management Board of the German-Bulgarian Chamber of Industry and Commerce, the Management Board of the Council of Women in Business in Bulgaria, the Management Board of America for Bulgaria Foundation as well as the Management Board of the Bulgarian Business Leaders Forum, as well as Member of the Board, Association for Modern Trade.