Dr. Margita Kon-Popovska

She was born in Bitola in 1948. She completed her primary and secondary education in Rijeka, Croatia. In 1972, she graduated in technical mathematics from the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Technology in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She obtained a master’s degree in operations research from the University of Ljubljana in 1975, after defending the thesis “Racunalniska obdelava zveznega dinamicnega linearnega programiranja”. She also obtained a doctorate in information and management sciences from the University of Ljubljana in 1992, after defending the dissertation “Enoparametrsko zvezno linearno programiranje, teoreticni in algoritemski pristop”. During the 1987/88 academic year, she undertook specialist training in the development of intelligent mathematical programming systems at the Department of Mathematics, University of Colorado Denver, United States. In 1997, under the DAAD programme, she spent two months as a visiting professor at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany, working in parametric programming. From 2000 onwards, she spent periods of one to four weeks at several European universities and institutions through projects that she managed, including the Open University in London and Loughborough University in the United Kingdom; the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen; the National Technical University of Athens; Aristotle University and the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki; the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna; Merseburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany; the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia; the University of Novi Sad in Serbia; and others. She began working while still a student in 1971, as an assistant programmer at the Computing Centre of the Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Mechanics at the University of Ljubljana. In 1972, she became an independent programmer at the Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana. She moved to Skopje in 1973, where she was appointed an expert associate at the University’s Institute of Mathematics with Numerical Centre. She was subsequently promoted to lecturer and senior lecturer and, after obtaining her doctorate, to associate professor of operations research and informatics at the Institute of Informatics within the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. She was appointed full professor in 1998. Dr Margita Kon-Popovska has extensive teaching experience. In informatics programmes, she has taught Operations Research, Databases, Databases II, Computer Graphics, Information Systems, Modelling and Simulation with Visualisation, and previously also Programming Languages and Data Structures. She has taught or continues to teach informatics courses to students of physics, biology and geography at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics; to students of sociology, defence, social work and social policy, and history at the Faculty of Philosophy; and computer-aided design at the Faculty of Architecture. She teaches Operations Research and Databases at the Institute of Mathematics and has also taught Operations Research at the faculties of economics in Skopje and Shtip. She taught a mathematics course at the Faculty of Forestry. In addition to her home institute, she has lectured in postgraduate programmes at the faculties of medicine and mechanical engineering, in the interdisciplinary molecular-biology programme at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and in chemistry programmes. Since 2003, she has also taught Databases and Information Systems at South East European University in Tetovo. She has published 64 scientific papers. She has served as project leader or co-leader for North Macedonia in 18 international projects funded by TEMPUS, PHARE, FP5, FP6, NATO Science for Peace and UNESCO, three of which were ongoing at the time, and in ten national projects funded by the Ministry of Education and Science, the Open Society Institute and the University. She has also participated in six additional TEMPUS projects and three projects funded by the Ministry of Education and Science. She has written 11 teaching resources, while authorised current lecture materials are available on the Institute’s e-learning website. She has also completed numerous professional projects and applications, most notably the design of information systems, including the Library Information System of the Republic of Macedonia, the Scientific and Technological Information System of the Republic of Macedonia, and the Faculty Information System. Kon-Popovska’s principal research focus is parametric linear programming for specific types of problems, from both theoretical and algorithmic perspectives. She also conducts research in databases and data warehouses, information systems, information technologies in education, e-learning and distance learning. She has supervised two doctoral dissertations and four master’s theses. She is an active member of several international and national professional associations and their boards and committees. She is the national representative to the TERENA General Assembly and Vice-President of the MARNET Management Board. She has served on the programme committees of the Balkan Conferences in Informatics—including as organiser and Programme Committee Chair of the Second Balkan Conference in Informatics, BCI 2005, in Ohrid—and of the Balkan Conferences on Operational Research, as well as on the Advisory Board of the journal Information Technologies and Control of the Bulgarian Association of Automation and Informatics. Particularly significant is her longstanding commitment to building the Macedonian Academic and Research Network and integrating the Republic of Macedonia into European and global information networks. In 2004–2005, this resulted in the construction of a university gigabit optical and wireless computer network and its connection to the academic networks of South-East Europe and GÉANT, as well as to the European grid networks SEE-GRID and EGEE. She headed the Institute from 1993 to 1995, managed the Computing Centre at the Institute of Informatics from 1995 to 1997, managed the Computing Centre at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics from 2003 to 2005, and became Head of the Institute again in 2005. She founded specialised laboratories for multimedia, visualisation and computer graphics; virtual digital libraries; distance learning; continuing education for librarians; grid clusters; and other areas.