Dima Yankova holds a PhD in local development and international cooperation from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. She was a Marie Curie fellow and a member of POLISS – an Innovative Training Network, funded by the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The overarching goal of POLISS was to contribute to improving the design and implementation of the EU’s Smart Specialisation Policies. In her doctoral thesis Dima explored the antecedents of tie formation in Valencia’s regional publicly-funded R&D network by considering both funded and unfunded partnerships, and further assessed the implications of forging strong connections for knowledge transfer processes. In February 2024 she joined the ANET Lab of the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies in Hungary as a postdoctoral research fellow, where she will be studying teams in science and innovation to understand how the diversity of partners and the group dynamics influence the quality of a team’s output.