Atanas Tchobanov, Bulgaria, is the founder and director of the Bulgarian investigative outlet BIRD.bg.
Tchobanov is the former editor-in-chief of Bivol.bg. He has been exposing the state-mafia nexus in Bulgaria since 2010 and has been working with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) since 2012. He served as an OCCRP board member from 2016 to 2018.
Tchobanov has worked on the Azerbaijani Laundromat, the Troika Laundromat, OpenLux, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers and other big international projects.
He holds a PhD in computational linguistics from Paris Ouest University and is also interested in big data harvesting and exploring, forensic methods, and encryption techniques for protecting communications and journalistic sources.
Tchobanov is a co-recipient of the Sigma Award 2020, the Global Shining Light Award Certificate of Excellence in 2017 and 2018, and the Serbian National Award for Investigative Reporting in 2015 and 2016.
