Boyko Stoimenov - Research

Curriculum Vitae

In case anyone would be interested in making me a job offer that I can't refuse, and would need a formal CV for that, I'd gladly mail onein no time at all. Just for a start, here's a brief and informal self-introduction. I thought I'd start with the time I was 9 and my achievement in life was the ability to eat a whole box of chocolate candies without seemingly opening it, to the great surprise of my parents. Then I quickly figured, that won't land me a dream job, so I'll skip it and start from high school.

(1991) High School - "Boyan Penev" Secondary School for Foreign Languages, Sofia. I studied English and Russian. Achieved some popurarity among the punkish population.

(1996) M.Sc. in Mech. Engineering - "Todor Kableshkov" Higher School of Transport, Sofia. Did my best, graduated with honours. The inscribed watch must still be at home somewhere.

(1996-1998) Service engineer - Ekko Ltd., Bulgaria. We were dealing with Caterpillar, Bobcat and Ingersol-Rand machines at the time and I had to travel around the country fixing them. A thing I learned from the old hands on the job was that: "In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice there is a great deal of difference." It seems it's as applicable to research as it is to machine maintenance. You can see me in this photo standing on a giant CAT 777 mining truck at the Assarel-Medet copper mines near Panagyurishte in Bulgaria.

(1998-2003) Research Student, Ph.D. student - Lab of Tribology, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. Here I started doing research on frictional sound. It was a brand new topic in the lab, so I had complete freedom to educate myself, to build up a test appartaus and write the software for the data acquisition and analysis.I became proficient with LabVIEW and MATLAB in the course. Most importantly, I had a good experience in establishing a new research field in the lab, and had my fair share of failures and sporadic successes, each of them very dear to my heart.

(2003-2005) Research Associate - Lab of Tribology, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. At my Research Associate position I was teaching computer programming classes and did laboratory demonstrations in Tribology. I enjoyed advising graduate and undergraduate students and I was wrapping up my dissertation in my spare time. I was successful in getting scientific research grants for my research and I was invited to give talks about frictional sound at leading Japanese bearing and brake manufacturers. I also had the chance to help my professor organize several scientific conferences.

(2005-2008) Research Scientist - Bio-Mimetic Control Reseach Center, RIKEN Institute, Nagoya, Japan. I did research on electro-active polymers, dubbed "artificial muscles". Knowledge of tribology and surface treatments was quite useful in improving the performance of ionic polymer-metal composites (IPMC). As a mechanical engineer I was back to designing mechanisms and we have applied several patents for mechanisms using electro-active polymers.

(2008-present) Invited Scientist - CNRS, Laboratoty of Tribology and System Dynamics, Ecole Centrale de Lyon, France. I study the dynamics of contact interfaces.

Hope this was helpful. If you'd like to know anything else, please drop me a mail...

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