Stefka Fidanova holds a Master's degree in Mathematical Modeling and a PhD in Computer Science from Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski ”, Bulgaria. Since 1993 works at the Institute for Parallel Information Processing (now part of the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies). Since 2005 is an associate professor. She spent 2 years from 2000 to 2002. at the Free University of Brussels as an assistant to the European Commission Marie Curie, works with Prof. Marco Dorigo. Her main areas of research are metaheuristic and stochastic methods for combinatorial optimization, parallel processing, parallel methods and algorithms, mathematical modeling.