Dessislava Kirilova​ has served as a fellow and consultant at the Qualitative Data Repository (www.qdr.org) since its establishment in 2012. In that capacity, she has assisted in shaping the repository’s policies, acquisitions outreach, curatorial support for depositors (including in dealing with human participants and copyright constraints), and the processing and publication of all commissioned pilot projects. Her related interests are in educating social science researchers in good data practices, starting in the research planning stages. She is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Yale University. Her substantive work in the discipline focuses on post-communist foreign policies, European integration and the processes that lead to national identity formation, as well as elite interviewing and archival historical approaches. For her dissertation she engaged in both methods during extensive fieldwork in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Poland, as well as in various EU institutions in Brussels, Belgium.