I received my B.A. in Physics (with honors) and Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017.  I worked with Dr. Vijay Balasubramanian and Dr. Ann Hermunstad for my honors thesis titled Local Statistics of Natural Images Inform Visual Segmentation and Gist Perception with Foreseeable Applications in Scene Analysis and Art Characterization. My summers of 2016 and 2017 were spent at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics division, collaborating with Dr. William Hlavacek on rule-based modeling of protein pathways in energy metabolism and, subsequently, Boolean modeling of these pathways.

After graduating from Penn, I began a PhD program in Physics at The University of Texas at Austin under the guidance of Dr. Thomas Yankeelov in the Center for Computational Oncology and (informally) Dr. Jonathan Tamir in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  My PhD thesis work consisted of 3 aims with an overall theme of advancing data acquisition and analyses methods for fast, multi-contrast quantitative MRI. These three aims are described below.

Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Radiology at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine under the guidance of Dr. Despina Kontos. My work explore radiomic features from MRI for improving breast cancer risk stratification. 

Please take a look at  my CV and publications for more details on my academic journey and research findings.

I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in a neighborhood called Boyana, located right at the base of Vitosha mountain. When I was 3 years old, my parents and I moved to the USA to join the Clyde Beaty Cole Brothers circus with the encouragement of other Bulgarian immigrants. A few years later, we settled permanently near Orlando, FL.

Having been around animals all my life, I developed a strong interest in Biology, which generalized to an interest in how the world around us works. It turns out that the field of Physics addresses this topic. I was lucky to be able to cultivate this curiosity through summer schools during high school, like SSP and the Perimeter Institute's ISSYP. Ultimately maintaining a love for both sciences, I opted for a double major in college, which brought me to my biology-themed Physics PhD.

These days, my interests include reading, weight lifting, vegan baking, amateur photography, and teaching my cat tricks and taking her on adventures. I am also working on learning my 4th language! Before the global pandemic, I would enjoy visiting Bulgaria in the summers and traveling in general.