Jordanka Zlatanova is Professor Emeritus of Molecular Biology at the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Wyoming. She is a native of Bulgaria and received her MS degree in Biochemistry from the St. Petersburg's State University in Russia (1968), her Ph.D. degree from Ernst Boehringer Institute for Drug Research in Vienna, Austria and the Institute of Molecular Biology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia (1980), and her Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) degree from the Institute of Genetics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (1989). She founded and chaired the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Institute of Genetics for nine years before moving to the United States to work as a Senior Research Professor in the laboratory of Dr. van Holde, with whom she shares an interest in chromatin structure and dynamics. After two years at the Argonne National Laboratory as a Deputy Director of the Biochip Technology Center and four years at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of NY University, she moved to Wyoming to chair the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Wyoming.

Dr. Zlatanova has published over 200 papers cited more than 7000 times. She has co-authored three books: Replication and Transcription of Chromatin (1992), and recently Molecular Biology; Structure and Dynamics of Genomes and Proteomes (2016) and The Evolution of Molecular Biology. The Search for the Secrets of Life (2018). These two recent books were written together with Ken van Holde. She has also co-edited two books: Biology at the Single-Molecule Level (2001) and Chromatin Structure and Dynamics: State-of-the-Art (2004). Her teaching experience includes undergraduate and graduate courses in biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, microbiology, genetics, and general biology. In addition, dr. Zlatanova has given close to 90 invited presentations in 19 countries all over the world.