Dr. Kiril Avramov
Fellow, Intelligence Studies Project
Research Co-Director, Global (Dis)Information Lab
Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic & Eurasian Studies
Dr. Kiril Avramov is a non-resident Fellow to the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently serves as Director of UT’s Global (Dis)Information Lab and is an Assistant Professor at UT’s Department of Slavic & Eurasian Studies.
Dr. Avramov was the Acting Vice-Rector for International Relations and Research at the New Bulgarian University (NBU) in Sofia, Bulgaria and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at NBU. He studied previously at Gustavus Adolphus College (USA/MN), the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), University of Sofia (Bulgaria), Central European University (Hungary), and NBU. He taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Sofia until 2005 and, from 2006-2010, was also the Director of the international consultancy and research institute “Political Capital” in Bulgaria. In 2010, he was appointed as the Director for International Relations of Political Capital at the firm’s headquarters in Budapest.
Dr. Avramov’s main research interests are information warfare, psychological operations and mass cognitive hacking, as well as the “weaponization of information” and their respective application and effects on individual and group decision-making processes in the Central and Eastern Europe and MENA regions. Additional areas of interest include political elites’ and non-elites’ decision-making resilience mechanisms and radicalization in post-transition democracies during identified active “psyops” and third party information operations.
Dr. Avramov is a member of the Bulgarian Political Science Association and the ECPR’s standing groups on Extremism & Democracy, Central and East European Politics, Elites and Political Leadership, Politics and the Arts, and Southeast Europe. He is also a member of the RAN-DERAD network under the Migration and Home Affairs Directorate of the European Commission.
Dr. Avramov was a Fulbright Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) at the University of Texas at Austin in 2015-2016. He earned a full scholarship for his PhD research at the University of Sofia and received an “Open Society Institute-Sofia” scholarship for his year-long PhD specialization at the Central European University in Budapest.