Veselin Draganov graduated in archaeology in Bucharest, Romania in 1983, with a dissertation on sunken settlements along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast in the light of known at that time facts about this type of archaeological monuments.
Since 1979, as a student and employee of the National Archaeological Institute with Museums at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, he participated in numerous archaeological excavation and field surveys on land and under water in Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece (Durankulak, Yaylata, Promakhon, Topolnitsa, Ostrovul Korbului, Sarmisegetuza). Between 1988 and 2016, he participated as a deputy and scientific supervisor in all underwater archaeological excavations, surveys, and preliminary inspections conducted during this period by the Center for Underwater Archeology: (interdisciplinary research in the southern bay of Nessebar, the sunken settlements from the Early Bronze Age, the beginning of the transitional period and the final phase of the Chalcolithic at Ropotamo, Kiten and Sozopol – V-III millennium BC), Varna-Pasha dere, the harbours of Ahtopol and Pomorie, the survey of a shipwreck from the Ottoman period in the harbour of Chernomorets, a geophysical survey of sunken submarines from the First and The Second World Wars.
His research interests are focused on the emergence and development of maritime cultures along the Western Black Sea coast from the end of the Neolithic to the end of the Early Bronze Age, maritime crafts and early navigation, the genesis of the Proto-Thracian coastal tribes, and the relationship between climate change and the coastline at the end of the Holocene with the course of the cultural and economic development of the coastal population in the past.
On these topics, he has numerous publications in Bulgarian and foreign specialized issues, presentations in international symposiums, articles, and films for the dissemination of the underwater archaeology and its development among the wider public.