Dr. Asel Sartbaeva is a Reader in Chemistry at the University of Bath. She received an MSc degree at the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University in 1999, and an MPhil degree from University of Cambridge in 2002, and a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge in 2008. Asel first worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Physics in ASU. In 2007 she was awarded a Samuel and Violet Glasstone Fellowship and moved to the Department of Chemistry in Oxford. Asel was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2010, which she took up in January 2011 on returning from the maternity leave.
In 2013, Asel moved to the University of Bath to start her own research group. She now has an active group with multiple PhD and masters students, working on projects related to functional materials. She focus on the synthesis of functional porous materials, encapsulation of nanomaterials, the thermal stability of biological substances and surface chemistry.
Asel published more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts in peer-reviewed International journals. She is an inventor of a new method for thermal stabilisation of vaccine proteins, called ensilication, and was nominated to be one of 175 Faces of Chemistry by the Royal Society of Chemistry, was named Woman of Achievement by The Beijing Platform for Action in 2015, was awarded an IChemE in Biotechnology and WISE World awards in 2017, received a Hanson Medal in 2019, a distinction by the Kyrgyz Republic in 2020.
Asel is a winner of Emerging Technologies Competition by RSC in 2020; a Woman of the Year by FDM Everywoman in Tech in 2021; and an Ambassador for UNICEF’s “Girls in Science” programme