Irina RIBAROVA

Professor Irina Ribarova, PhD, MSs in Civil Engineering, MSc in Applied Mathematics and Informatics is an expert in water and sanitation field.

Her professional development has met her with challenging assignments for the EU Commission, the World Bank, EBRD, EIB, OECD. She performed consultancy work for international companies as well as research with leading EU Universities.

She is highly familiar with ISPA and Cohesion Fund projects in urban water management, including major project preparation, procurement planning and review, appraisal of water/wastewater projects, improving capacities of Municipality officials in project implementation. She has been a team member and a leader in assignments for development methodologies for implementation of WFD, Flood Directive, Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive. She has also contributed to the development of the Climate change adaptation strategy of Bulgaria, Socio-economic drought risk assessment, Preparation of River Basin Management Plans and Flood risk management plans.

Her experience as researcher and project leader in EU funded projects is in the fields of removal hazardous compounds from wastewaters and sludge, biological processes modeling in WWTPs and rivers, water saving technologies, flood and drought management, nutrients removal and recovery in WWTP, eco-efficiency of urban water systems, circular economy in water sector.

The University experience is in lecturing in “Ecology and environmental protection”, “Water supply and sanitation”, “Wastewater treatment plans” as well as supervising national and Erasmus MSc and PhD students. She is an author or co-author of 9 books and more than 80 research papers. The citations of her work bring her an H-index of 9.

Prof. Ribarova is a member of the Bulgarian Water Association and the Initiative for the Future of Great Rivers (IFGR.