Education Background 

I have created this website to bring together my professional experience and to reflect on my career development journey. I am a freelance development researcher with an environmental and social science background. Over the past 15 years, I have greatly benefited from various forms of education promoted by international development efforts focused on Central Asia. Growing up in the former Soviet town of Murghab in the eastern Pamirs (Tajikistan), which is like a Ladakh or Tibetan Plateau, I was selected for the Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) program supported by the U.S. Department of State in 2011. In the USA I became an alumnus of the American Council on Education (ACE) and proceeded to attain a Bachelor of Arts degree in the field Environmental Science program from American University of Central Asia (2012-2017) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. During my Master of Sciences studies at Cornell University in Upstate New York (2021),  I was lucky to participate in the Reppy Fellowship (2019-2020) program.  Now, I am finishing my Ph.D. from the joint International Environmental Humanities program with Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich and Institute of Geography, University of Augsburg, Germany.  All of these excellent international programs helped me to be part of interesting scientific projects expanding connections, networks, and institutional affiliations. To learn more about what I am up to these days, see more on this website.