Dilfuza Egamberdieva

Dilfuza Egamberdieva is a scientist in the field of agriculture using microbiology. She is the CEO and founder of Ecobiome R&D Ltd. Head of Biological Research and Food Safety Lab.

Context of Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan's soil was contaminated due to the long durations of unsustainable cotton cultivation during the Soviet Union era (1920-1990s)[1].

Egambirdiyeva argues,"Cotton production requires extensive use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers accompanied by over irrigation of the fields. This eventually led to the drying up by half of the Aral Sea and resulted in such widespread soil damage that other crops are compromised. Because plants are under saline or water imbalance, they become more vulnerable to diseases caused by pathogenic fungi. It is clear that the situation could be largely improved by replacing the chemicals with environmentally friendly biologicals…biofertilizers".

The soil had issues in its salinity causing plants to become more vulnerable to diseases due to stress from water imbalance [2].The Aral Sea would become known as the desert called Aralkum.

Early Life and Education

Egamberdieva was born in Uzbekistan. Her dream was to turn those contaminated soil back into healthy fertile soil for agriculture again.

Egamberdieva graduated in biology from the National University of Uzbekistan and received her PhD in Agricultural Sciences from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. She would conduct her postdoctoral studies at Helsinki University of Finland, University of Florence (Italy), Manchester Metropolitan University (UK), Leiden University of Netherlands, and Centre of Agricultural Landscape Research (Germany).

Career

In 2007, Egamberdieva would established the first research lab in Uzbekistan called Ecobiome R&D. She is also involved in promoting education for women and girls in STEM and has established Central Asian Chapter of The Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) in Uzbekistan. She is also involved in science policy and was elected as a expert team member in the German Council of Science and Humanities (WR). She was also appointed in 2018 as a High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) and UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in 2018-2022. She is also the National Focal Point Representative for UNESCO-SEPAN (Science and Technology Policy Asian Network), board committee member (2021-2023), and the Ambassador of American Society of Microbiology (ASM) in Uzbekistan. She is also a member of editorial boards like Elsevier. She has coauthor in 200 publications in peer reviewed and authored 6 books.

Research

Egamberdieva research is on soil microbiome which demonstrated that microbe can be use as a biostimulators, and control agent as an alternative to agrochemical in hostile environment. Some other researches is on plant stress tolerance, soil biology, and microbial diversity [3].

Microbiome in plant ecosystem

Award

• Egamberdieva won UNESCO J. Finlay Prize for Microbiology in 11-14-2023. [4]
• SCOPUS-2019 Regional Award "Top Scientist of the Year," TWAS (The World Academy of Science) Award in Agricultural Sciences (2013)
• TWAS-TWOWS-SCOPUS Young Women Research Award (2009)