Varbina Ivanova
PhD student

In 2020 I graduated from Sofia University (Bulgaria) with a degree in Chemical engineering. During my studies, I joined the Computational Chemistry and Spectroscopy group at the Department of Pharmaceutical and Applied Organic Chemistry where I did my Bachelor’s thesis project with a focus on using ab initio and DFT methods to study fluorescent DNA markers. Subsequently, I chose to pursue a Master’s degree in Computational Chemistry at Sofia University and I took part in an Erasmus+ traineeship program at the University of Barcelona (Spain). During the Erasmus internship, I developed my Master’s thesis project, in which I employed Ligand-field Molecular Mechanics and Molecular Dynamics methods to study SCO supramolecular structures. After I finished my Master’s degree in 2021, I did a research stay at the Computational Biology and Drug Design Group at the University of Barcelona, working on the investigation of the binding mechanism of Sphingosine kinase 1/2 inhibitors, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Xavier Barril. In February 2022 I joined the group as an ESR in the ALLODD ITN project.