Ivan Vachkov was born in 1973 in the city of Varna. He graduated in medicine from the Medical University of Varna in 2002. From 2004 to 2008, he was a doctoral student at Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan. He defended a dissertation on the topic " Inhibition of Axonal Outgrowth in the Tumor Environment: Involvement of Class 3 Semaphorins". Upon returning to Bulgaria, he briefly worked as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Biology at the Medical University of Varna, after which he completed two postdoctoral specializations at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. Since 2015, he has been an assistant professor, and since 2021, a chief assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the Medical University of Varna. He has five scientific publications in international journals with a total impact factor exceeding 15.
