Associate Professor Dr. Milen Georgiev

Position: Head of Department of Plant Cell Biotechnology, CPSBB

Milen I. Georgiev holds a PhD in biotechnology from the Stephan Angeloff Institute of Microbiology (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences). He has 17 years of experience in natural products field and has published in excess of 130 papers. He has delivered 50+ invited lectures in 20 different countries.

Milen holds several grants from the NSF of Bulgaria and framework programmes of the European Union (incl. H2020 – PlantaSYST project, well-funded with 30 million Euro).

In 2011 and 2015 he was awarded by the Bulgarian Government with Pythagoras award for outstanding scientist, besides “Marin Drinov” award (2009) and highly cited paper award (2018) of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Milen serves as an Associate Editor of Phytomedicine and Food and Chemical Toxicology (both published by Elsevier), and on the Editorial boards of Biotechnology Letters (Springer), Chinese Medicine (Springer Nature) and Molecules (MDPI), also prepared 10 Guest Editorials for major journals on biotechnology and natural products fields. Serving as a chairman he established the International Conference on Natural Products Utilization: from Plants to Pharmacy Shelf (ICNPU), which had four issues so far. The latest ICNPU edition attracted attention of 330+ participants from 50 different countries (www.icnpu.com/2019).

His current research focuses on the biosynthesis of fine molecules and the development of biotechnological tools for their sustainable mass production along with the application of emerging platforms for comprehensive metabolite profiling (i.e. NMR-based metabolomics) and biochemometrics (chemometrics in tandem with antineoplastic, anti-inflammatory and immunoregulatory assays).

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Amirova K., Dimitrova P., Marchev A.S., Aneva I.Y., Georgiev M.I. (2019) Clinopodium vulgare L. (wild basil) extract and its active constituents modulate cyclooxygenase-2 expression in neutrophils. Food and Chemical Toxicology. 124: 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fct.2018.11.054.

Joshi D.C., Zhang K., Wang C., Chandora R., Khurshid M., Li J., He M., Georgiev M.I., Zhou M. (2019) Strategic enhancement of genetic gain for nutraceutical development in buckwheat: A Genomics-driven Perspective. Biotechnology Advances. (accepted).

Vasileva L., Ivanovska M., Murdjeva M., Saracheva K., Georgiev M. (2019) Immunoregulatory natural compounds in stress-induced depression: An alternative or an adjunct to conventional antidepressant therapy? Food and Chemical Toxicology. 127: 81–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fct.2019.03.004.

Chen, L., Teng, H., Xie, Z., Cao, H., Cheang, W. S., Skalicka-Woniak, K., Georgiev,M., Xiao, J. (2018) Modifications of dietary flavonoids towards improved bioactivity: An update on structure–activity relationship. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition. 58(4):513–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2016.1196334.