UCSB Cosmology Group

Elena Hadjiyska

Elena (Ellie) Hadjiyska was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. After her graduation as a Valedictorian from Sofia High School of Mathematics, where she majored in physics, she came to the U.S. alone at the age of nineteen.

In the first six months of her stay in the U.S., Ellie learned English sufficiently well to enroll full time at Santa Barbara City College and was simultaneously employed on campus as a teaching assistant to physics, mathematics and chemistry professors and as a mathematics tutor and a tour guide. Soon after her arrival at the college, Ellie was elected a Vice President of the Student Senate and a year later she received a full, international students’ scholarship to attend Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

Currently, Ms. Hadjiyska is a graduate student in the experimental astrophysics group at UCSB and a senior physics engineer at the Astronomy Group of Raytheon Vision Systems.

Ms. Hadjiyska holds a Masters of Arts degree in physics from UCSB and a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the College of Creative Studies at UCSB.