Born in Vienna from Bulgarian father and English mother. Graduated in Physics and Mathematics at the Vienna University with a doctorate (1922). She had been working as an Assistant at the Vienna Institute for Radium Research.
In the autumn of 1923 she attempted to become an Assistant Professor in Physics at the Sofia University, but it was refused on the ground that she was not its alumna and of the lack of vacancies. In the next competition (1927) Kara-Michailova was also rejected because she was presented her habilitation work in manuscript. At that time she already had a significant number of important publications on alpha radiation and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. In December 1937 Kara-Michailova entered the second contest for Associate Professor in Experimental Physics. At the same time her 3-year-old specialization in the Cavendish Laboratory of Lord Rutherford was almost finished. Despite the confessions, she was fully formed young researcher, the competition was won by the other contender. In December 1938 Kara-Michailova applied the third contest for Associate Professor in Physics with special Meteorology and Geophysics. She presented 18 titles and a habilitation work, which according to one of the reviewers were insufficient because she had worked always with collaborators or under the guidance and it in the world’s best laboratories. Professor Manev wrote: How would Ms. Kara-Michailova be working in our conditions, I could not predict. He suggested other candidate because he was graduated and had been working in Bulgaria. Although the obstacles in late 1939 Kara-Michailova was elected as an Associate Professor, the first woman at the Sofia University. In subsequent years she was very depressed by her colleagues, men with crude manners. In the late 1940s Kara-Michailova run the Department of Atomic Physics (1945-1955) but was put in the list of “unreliable scientists” as a German graduate. She was dismissed from the University and moved to the Institute of Physics at the BAS. In fact she remained outside of science. Within the 1960s she was dealed with marginal scientific topics (radioactivity of mineral springs, rocks, mud and soil).
