Prof. Elitsa Encheva

Prof. Elitsa Encheva, MD, PhD is a Radiation Oncologist with over 20 years of experience - head and founder of the Radiotherapy Clinic, St. Marina University Hospital, Varna, and head of the Radiotherapy Department at the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiotherapy, Medical University of Varna.

She graduated from the Medical University of Sofia in 2003, was board-certified in Radiotherapy in 2009, and earned her PhD at MU-Sofia in 2011. In 2014, she completed a Master's degree in Public Health and Health Management, and in 2018 she was awarded the academic title of Professor at MU-Varna - the youngest in Radiotherapy in Bulgaria. She has specialized in Germany, Denmark, Belgium, the UK, Italy, Ireland, Israel, Switzerland and the Netherlands, among others. She is the only Bulgarian radiation oncologist on the teaching faculty of the International Stereotactic Radiosurgery Society (ISRS), and the author of over 100 scientific papers with a combined impact factor above 25 and more than 470 citations in international journals.

She holds the Honorary Badge of the Bulgarian Medical Association (2016) for her contribution to innovative medicine, and in the same year she and the Radiotherapy Clinic received the Varna Award for the installation of high-tech radiotherapy equipment. In 2025, she was recognized by Open Society Varna for her contribution to medicine and healthcare.

She participates in two European Commission-funded projects on 3D breast cancer imaging models (MaXIMA, PHENOMENO) and is co-principal investigator of the Swiss National Science Foundation project A-BEACON on AI-based brain metastases tracking and segmentation. She also leads a Medical University of Varna project to install an MRI unit for oncology care, funded through the EU's Integrated Territorial Investment programme.

Under her leadership, all modern radiotherapy techniques for adults and children - IMRT, VMAT, IGRT, SRS radiosurgery and SBRT - have been introduced into practice, and her team was first in Bulgaria to introduce chemoradiation and hyperfractionated accelerated radiotherapy for lung cancer, whole-brain hippocampal-sparing irradiation, PET-CT-guided radiotherapy planning, and deep-inspiration breath-hold irradiation for breast cancer and for radiosurgery of the lung and liver.