Dr Rossitza Kurdova-Mintcheva

Rossitza Kurdova-Mintcheva graduated from the Higher Medical Institute in Sankt Petersburg, Russia in 1972. She was appointed as a research fellow at the Parasitology and Tropical Medicine Department, National Centre of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases (NCIPD) in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 1979 she became a PhD at the E.I. Martzinovsky Institute of Medical Parasitology and Tropical Medicine in Moscow, and, in 1980, a specialist in medical parasitology and later associate professor and professor at the NCIPD.

Dr Kurdova-Mintcheva has served as head of the National Reference Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases Diagnosis from the Department of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine, NCIPD (1991–2011) and head of the Department of Parasitology and Tropical Medicine (2000–2014). She has been a national consultant in parasitology for the Ministry of Health of Bulgaria (1996–2013), where she concentrated her professional activities on research (epidemiological surveillance, control, prevention and laboratory diagnosis of indigenous and tropical imported parasitic diseases), and teaching as a regular lecturer in Medical Parasitology and Tropical Medicine for students and physicians at the Higher Medical Schools in Bulgaria. She has also carried out lectures for WHO-EURO courses in malaria surveillance, control and elimination, and in malaria laboratory diagnosis in several countries.

Since 2000, she has worked as a WHO temporary consultant on malaria control and elimination in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. From 2011–2014 and based in WHO, she worked on malaria elimination and participated in the development of 10 case studies. She provided technical assistance to national malaria programmes in Bhutan, Cambodia, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam (2016–2018), in addition to first malaria elimination certification missions to Armenia (2011) and Kyrgyzstan (2014). She led the malaria certification missions in Sri Lanka (2016) and Argentina (2019).