Irena Pavlova is EU Projects Manager at GATE – Big Data Centre of Excellence at Sofia University. She leads the initiation, organization 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. She is also Assistant Professor at Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Sofia University, specialized in software engineering and data interoperability. Previously, Irena has been working in industry, managing and conducting research and development in more than 30 industrial and EU funded projects. Research interests include Data Spaces, Data Management and enrichment, data interoperability.