Robert Penchovsky is a full professor of molecular genetics,
bioinformatics, and synthetic biology and a head of the Laboratory of Synthetic
Biology and Bioinformatics at the Faculty of Biology, Sofia University “St.
Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria, where he obtained his master’s degree in
biochemistry and molecular genetics, and his associate’s degree in applied
computer sciences. He earned his doctoral degree in genetics from Cologne
University, Germany while researching in the fields of microfluidics and DNA
computing for the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft at Schloss Birlinghoven in Sankt
Augustin (near Bonn), Germany. He carried out his postdoctoral study in the fields of
computational and RNA synthetic biology at Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
As a research and teaching faculty at Sofia University since 2010, he pioneered
teaching and research in the fields of synthetic biology and bioinformatics in
Bulgaria. His publications have over 1100 citations, an impact factor of over
220 points, and an h-index of 16 points. He has been a project leader on 12
research projects and has taken part in 17 projects in his laboratory. In
Penchovsky’s laboratory, 16 master’s students and 6 doctoral students have
successfully defended their theses. He is the head of several master’s programs
in genetics and genomics in Bulgarian and in English.
