"Each solved task motivated me for the next one and I couldn't wait to get to the solution faster."

Verka Stoyanova shares about herself that she likes to talk with numbers. The sciences have always been her passion since she was little, when at the beginning of the school year she read all the textbooks in advance. Then she dreamed of inventing a way to teleport herself. And today, together with her team in one of the sectors of the Research and Development department in Aurubis Bulgaria, they solve complex tasks to help production and discover new methods.

Verka has been working in the company for nearly 30 years now. She started in the year when the plant was privatized. Initially working as a Laboratory Technician, she later became a Chemist, as she likes to say "by vocation, not by education." Not long after, she became Head of the "Environmental Analysis" sector in Analytical Laboratories, where she was responsible for the accreditation.

Her next big challenge comes with the founding of the Research and Development department, which quite naturally becomes an attraction for her with a variety of tasks that provoke Verka to unleash her natural curiosity. There she works to support the company's main productions and looks for solutions to the "bottlenecks" in the processes.

Verka likes to stay informed about all current topics in science that can find application in the factory, and therefore she reads a lot - she reads in the morning, she reads at lunch, sometimes she also reads in the evening after work. When the topic is interesting, it absorbs you and you simply cannot stop until you understand it from the ground up.

Such kind of people work for us, curious and always looking for more and more knowledge, not for their own sake, but to contribute to the bigger goal. All colleagues from the Research and Development department actively participate in most feasibility studies for the initiation of investment projects in the company.

At the moment, one of the biggest challenges in the work of Verka and her team is the upcoming project for Reconstruction and expansion of the wastewater treatment plant. A project that started years ago literally from the laboratory beakers, it went through tests in real conditions and a pilot installation. And so to the present moment, when the industrialization of the processes is coming.