Irena Pavlova is EU Projects Manager at GATE – Big Data Centre of Excellence. She is responsible for the initiation, organisation and implementation of GATE’s research projects under various EU and national programmеs. She is also involved in the establishment of the Bulgaria Urban Data Space. Irena is also an Assistant Professor at Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Sofia University, specialized in software engineering. Previously, Irena has been working in industry managing and conducting research and development in more than 30 projects both industrial and EU funded. Research interests include Data Spaces, Data Management and enrichment, data interoperability