Professor, Sofia University
Nikolay Denkov is a Professor of physical chemistry. He specialized in Japan and Sweden and worked as a lead scientist in Unilever (USA) and Rhodia (France) companies. In his studies, he combines fundamental and applied aspects, and has been a Principal Investigator (PI) of more than 30 international research projects with global companies, incl. Unilever, BASF, Saint Gobain, Dow Corning, and Rhodia. He is a co-author of > 150 research papers (incl. 2 papers in the prestigious journal Nature) and 8 international patents, cited > 5500 times in the international literature. He presented more than 60 invited lectures abroad, incl. lectures in the universities of Berkeley and Stanford (CA, USA), Manchester (UK), ESPCI (France), Kyoto (Japan), Santiago (Chile) and others. He is a recipient of the national award for research Pythagoras (2010) and of a medal of honor of Sofia University for remarkable scientific achievements. He is a co-founder of the civil movement MoveBG (2013). In the period 2014-2016 he was a deputy-minister of science and education, and played an important role for the successful negotiation of the operational program “Science and education for smart growth” with the EC and for the start of long-pending reforms in the area of higher education in Bulgaria.
6 high-profile keynotes talk about the factors that affect the entrepreneurship in Bulgaria, reflecting on the GEM report and sharing their perspective on the topic. In Bulgarian, with simultaneous translation in English