On 15 February 2019 at the official ceremony at the Center for Education, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, were awarded the winners of the PhD students competition “The best paper” on the topic of the dissertation. The first prize in the 6th Department  “Climate Change, Risks and Natural Resources” was awarded to a PhD student from IO-BAS – Nina Dzhembekova, for the paper «Dzhembekova, N., Urusizaki, S., Moncheva, S., Ivanova, P. and Nagai, S., 2017. Applicability of massively parallel sequencing on monitoring harmful algae at Varna Bay in the Black Sea. Harmful Algae, 68, pp.40-51». The presented work is an innovative study of the eukaryotic phytoplankton biodiversity and monitoring of the potentially toxic species in the Bulgarian Black Sea waters on the base of the application of High-Throughput Sequencing of DNA. The results obtained (new for the Black Sea phytoplankton species and new DNA sequence data) are an important contribution to the study of the Black Sea biodiversity, completing the global genetic databases where information on the Black Sea is scarce, and expanding the knowledge of biogeography of species on a global scale.