Asel Sartbaeva Asel is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Chemistry at the University of Bath, a co-founder and CEO of EnsiliTech, a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF’s “Girls in Science” program, and an Enterprise Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She received an MSc degree at the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University in 1999, and an MPhil and PhD degrees at the University of Cambridge in 2002 and 2008. She worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Physics at Arizona State University from 2005 till 2007. In 2007, she was awarded a Samuel and Violet Glasstone Fellowship, and moved to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. Asel was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2010, which she took up in January 2011. She held this fellowship until 2019. In 2012, she moved to the University of Bath to start her own research group. Asel graduated 14 postgraduate students, and for 6 of those students she was a primary supervisor. Asel has offered one-year research projects to more than 40 MChem and MSc students as part of their undergraduate degree. She now had an active group with 2 PhD, a PostDoc and Masters Students working on projects related to design of novel porous materials and the thermal stability of biopharmaceuticals. Asel has published more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, has given more than 30 keynote and invited talks in International meetings, and filed three patents. Asel is a co-inventor of the ensilication method, developed to make vaccines and other biologicals room-temperature stable for easier transport and storage across the globe. In 2021, Asel registered EnsiliTech as a limited company and next year, with three other co-founders, spun- out from the University of Bath. Asel was nominated to be one of the 175 Faces of Chemistry by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and a Women of Achievement by UN Beijing Platform for Action by UNIFEM in 2014. In 2016, Innovate UK awarded Asel’s group with a “Biggest Game-Changing Technology” award for work on vaccine stability without refrigeration. In 2017, she won IChemE award in the Biotechnology category and a WISE World award. In 2019, Asel won Hanson Medal from IChemE for her article in the Chemical Engineer journal. In 2020, Asel won Emerging Technologies Competition from the RSC. In 2021, Asel became a Woman of the Year by FDM Everywoman in Tech and received a distinction from the Government of Kyrgyzstan for achievements in Science, Research and Education. In 2022, she was awarded the Precedent award by the Civil Initiatives Group in Kyrgyzstan.
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