Faculty experts

Dr. Coil’s research focuses broadly on reconstructing hominin behavior, diet, and subsistence at Paleolithic archaeological sites, which includes disentangling hominin and carnivore competition and space use through spatial analyses and taphonomy/zooarchaeology. Reed is currently part of international teams of scientists working at the Paleolithic sites across Georgia, including Dmanisi, Tsutskhvati, Sakazhia, and a newly discovered site of Orozmani, where he is exploring the spatial patterning and taphonomy to understand site formation, site use, and subsistence patterns. Through this research, Reed is very interested in how humans and carnivores contribute to the accumulation of bones at archaeological sites and whether there are predictable patterns that help us distinguish these processes.

Nazarbayev University, Qatar Aeronautical College, British Council, IDP

Dr. Tursonjan Tokay was hitherto Lecturer of Anatomy at Xinjiang Medical University (China), and Assistant Professor of Physiology at the University of Rostock (Germany), and Deputy Director of the NU National Laboratory Astana. He is an accomplished neurobiologist with a working knowledge of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Histology, Human Anatomy and Physiology, and Neuroscience. He is experienced in the research areas of synaptic transmission and plasticity, aging, and neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Tokay has extensive research experience in investigation on synaptic plasticity and cognitive function in the context of aging, epilepsy and neurodegenerative diseases using a variety of approaches, including neural cell culture, electrophysiology, biochemistry, and animal behavior tests. Dr. Tokay is the author of a number of research articles relevant to this topic, published in international scientific journals.

Dr. Jessica Neafie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 2020, following an M.A. in Climate Science and Policy from Columbia University, an M.A. in Diplomatic Studies from the University of Westminster, and a B.A. in Asian Studies and Political Science from the University of Florida. Her research focuses on international political economy, environmental policy, and the geopolitical dynamics of Central Asia, with particular emphasis on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), public perceptions of foreign investments, and the interplay of infrastructure and Geopolitics.

Dr. Adhikari received his B.A. from Coe College in 2013 and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 2018. His research revolves around United Nations General Assembly voting, foreign aid delivery tactics of traditional donor states, and human rights. His work has been published in Conflict Management and Peace Science, International Interactions, Journal of Human Rights, and Research & Politics, among others. Professor Adhikari regularly teaches Introduction to International Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis, Quantitative Methods, Politics of Development, and International Organization at Nazarbayev University. Dr. Adhikari received his B.A. from Coe College in 2013 and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 2018.

The professor obtained his “CUM LAUDE” PhD in Physical Sciences from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. During his PhD studies, he gained extensive experience in developing theoretical models and implementing numerical methods to describe microscopically the nuclear many-body problem. He specialized in the restoration of broken symmetries and configuration mixing within the Generator Coordinate Method (GCM). After completing his PhD, he continued his nuclear structure research at prestigious institutions, including the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Tübingen University (Germany), Yale University (USA), the Institute for the Structure of Matter (CSIC, Madrid), the Atomic Energy Commission (Saclay, France), Jyvaskyla University (Finland), the University of Huelva (Spain), the University of Surrey (United Kingdom), and the Departments of Physics and Astronomy and Chemistry at Rice University (USA). He has developed a broad expertise in correlated many-fermion systems (both nuclear and electronic) and has contributed to a variety of nuclear structure topics, such as the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov approximation, symmetry restoration, configuration mixing within the Generator Coordinate Method, and the self-consistent restoration of Galilean invariance in the nuclear many-body problem. He was among the first researchers to introduce a hierarchy of symmetry-projected approximations, inherited directly from nuclear structure physics, in studies of one- and two-dimensional Hubbard models and molecular systems. The professor has worked as an Associate Professor at Kuwait University and was awarded a distinguished researcher position at the University of Seville. During this time, his research focused on microscopic studies of correlated many-fermion systems, both molecular and nuclear.

Ph D program Director, 2024-present Full Professor, Nazarbayev University (NU), 2014-2024; Chair of the Department of Mathematics NU, 2017-2023. University of New Orleans, USA, 2002-2014.

Prof. Prashant K. Jamwal earned a PhD degree and a postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Earlier he graduated from I.I.T., in India, securing first position in all the disciplines. Presently, he is working as an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at SEDS. He is also working as an adjunct professor at University of Canberra, Australia. He is actively pursuing research in the application of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. Over the past decade, he has applied his research in the development of medical robots for rehabilitation and surgical applications besides developing improved algorithms for cancer data analytics. Prof. Prashant received three prestigious World Bank Grants and has launched three startup companies and established a Center of Excellence in Medical Research and Robotics. Lately, he has successfully commercialized an autonomous robotic Gait Rehabilitation System after furnishing all the regulatory requirements, thus making expensive medical robots accessible to small clinics. He has more than 25 years of teaching and research experience and has published more than 100 research articles in reputed international journals/conferences. Prof. Prashant has won many awards such as Jewel of India, Asian Universities Alliance Scholar Award, Best paper awards, etc., and in 2019 United Nations acknowledged one of his robotics projects in top twenty innovative projects in the world.