I received my B.A. in Physics (with honors) and Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017.  While at Penn, 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 Dr. Jonathan Tamir in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  My 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.

Click the figures below for a summary of each aim:

In September 2022, I became a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Radiology at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine in the Computational Biomarker Imaging Group (CBIG) led by Dr. Despina Kontos. My work focused on radiomic feature extraction from breast MRI for improving breast cancer risk stratification as well as leveraging deep learning techniques for MRI analysis. On January 1st, 2024, I moved with CBIG to the Department of Radiology at Columbia University, where Dr. Kontos took on the directorship role for the brand new Center for Innovation in Imaging Biomarkers and Integrated Diagnostics.

Within September 2024, I took a leave from academia and joined a start-up called HOPPR.ai as an Innovation Research Scientist, where I'm now contributing to the development of a foundation model for optimizing radiology workflows.

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

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 and the natural world, 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 Harvard SSP and the Perimeter Institute's ISSYP. Ultimately maintaining a love for both sciences, I opted for a double major in Physics and Biology at Penn, which brought me to my medical imaging-themed Physics PhD at UT Austin.

These days, my interests include weight lifting, climbing (indoors and outdoors sometimes), going to diners with my husband, amateur photography, reading science fiction, and teaching my cat (Zara) tricks. I am also working on learning my 4th language! I enjoy visiting Bulgaria in the summers and traveling in general (often for conferences in interesting places).