Fulbright Bulgaria – Changing Lives for 30 Years!

Dr. Proikova is a highly cited computational physicist and research professor at Sofia University. She also heads the High-performance Computing Lab at Sofia Tech Park, holds two doctorates, and co-founded the Bulgarian Center for Women in Technology. In 1994, she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago. She is among the Forbes 2022 list of 50 women across Europe, the Middle East and Africa who are “proving that 50 and beyond is the new golden age”. 

Photo credit: Forbes Bulgaria

Fulbright Civil Society Scholar Ivo Danchev visited the Crow tribe in Montana on a photo-journalistic project in 2009. His work has been published in National Geographic – Bulgaria, among other magazines. Following his Fulbright grant, a travelling exhibition titled “Indian Summer” was co–sponsored by the US Embassy in Bulgaria and America for Bulgaria Foundation. Most recently, his photographs of Bulgarian kukeri (mummers) were featured in an exhibition at the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Paris. 

Lyubomir Minkov received his MBA from Emory University on a Fulbright Student Grant in 2012. He had the opportunity to participate in the Fulbright Enrichment Seminar entitled “Democracy in Action: The Influence of Growing Minority Populations in Changing Political Landscapes”, alongside approximately 140 other Fulbright Foreign Students from around the world. Today Lyubomir is Senior Vice President of Marketing at FairPrice Group, Singapore. 

Photo credit: Tigerhall Thinkfluencer

George Siedel is a Business Administration and Business Law Professor at the University of Michigan. Professor Siedel was a Distinguished Fulbright Scholar to Bulgaria in 2001 and continued coming back each summer until 2014 as a lecturer on negotiation at the Fulbright International Summer Institute, also bringing along a cohort of UMich students. He has published numerous books on business and negotiation strategy, and hundreds of thousands of students have taken his courses via the Coursera platform. 

Photo credit: Coursera

Following her Peace Corps service in Bulgaria, Sarah Perrine came back in 2002 as a Fulbright Student Researcher and studied emerging leadership trends and policies to promote social inclusion. She is the founder and CEO of the Trust for Social Achievement, a grantmaking NGO primarily focused on removing barriers to equality among Roma. The Trust received the Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements Award from the United Nations Environment Program in 2017 for its project serving 1,800 families in economically disadvantaged communities. 

Executive Director Angela Rodel, an acclaimed translator of Bulgarian, musician, writer and ethnomusicologist, was a Fulbright Student Researcher in 1996-97 and returned as a Fulbright-Hayes Fellow in 2004. She was awarded a PEN Translation Fund grant in 2010 and two translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2014 and 2023. ED Rodel also serves as a Trustee Member at the American University of Bulgaria. She was awarded Bulgarian citizenship for her significant contributions to Bulgarian society through her translation work.