Bio
Professor Dr. Roumiana Tsenkova holds both masters and doctoral degrees in Automation Engineering from the Technical University (TU) Rousse, Bulgaria as well as a second doctorate in Agriculture from Hokkaido University, Japan.
She joined the faculty of TU in 1978 rising through the ranks and beginning her investigations in Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) developing a sensor for disease (mammary gland inflammation) diagnosis under the supervision of Prof. N. I. Kirilin from Moscow Agricultural Academy of Science, Russia.
In 1990 she was awarded a Japanese Monbusho Scholarship for post-doctoral studies of sensors for robotic milking at Obihiro University, Japan. In 1992, she moved to Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, as a researcher to develop NIR technology for dairy cows biomonitoring, and then from 1996 to Kobe University where, as a tenured professor, she teaches Fluid Mechanics (in English and Japanese) and Biomeasurement Technology (in Japanese). Additionally, since 2015 she serves as adjunct professor at the prestigious Medical Faculty of Keio University in Tokyo.
She have had numerous interdisciplinary projects aimed at applications of near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and multivariate analyses for bio-diagnosis and biomonitoring related to functional studies in life science, biotechnology and agriculture.
She is the first scientist ever to apply NIRS for disease diagnosis. She demonstrated, through perturbation NIR spectroscopy of water and biofluids, a clearer understanding of the relationship between the spectral characteristics of water molecular system and its biological functions and in 2005 proposed the establishment of a novel science – Aquaphotomics as a complementary “omics” discipline aimed at using light-water interaction as a source of information about the structure, function, and dynamics of living organisms and/or aqueous systems.
Her work is recognized throughout the world as attested by numerous invited talks, collaborative studies and fifteen international and Japanese patents. She has written more than 100 peer reviewed papers and book chapters, and she won many international awards, among them the prestigious Tomas Hirschfield Award for her work on NIRS for Disease Diagnosis and Pathogen Identification, and for establishing the Aquaphotomics.