He will be working on this project with Prof Deon Meiring, a staff member of the Department of Human Resource Management at the University of Pretoria, Prof Fons van de Vijver of the Tilburg University in the Netherlands and several other colleagues from the South African Personality Inventory (SAPI) research team.

The SAPI project has developed, from an indigenous perspective, a common personality model for the 11 official languages of South Africa and is now aiming at the validation of an assessment instrument for that model.

Originally from Bulgaria, Dr Valchev completed his undergraduate studies in psychology at the University of Athens in Greece, his graduate studies at the Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and for the past several years he has been studying personality in the multicultural South African context. “I have a passion for languages, and in my free time, I love being close to nature”, says Dr Valchev.