Dr. Rostislav Bukasov is an Associate Professor at the School of Sciences and Humanities, at Nazarbayev University. He grew up in Ukraine and earned his specialist degree in chemistry from Kharkiv National University in 1994. After working at the National Center of Drug Research for two years, he was employed in and soon owned a small photo service business operating in Russia and Ukraine. Then, he worked as an analytical chemist in the pharmaceutical industry in Kharkiv for 15 months. He came to the Graduate School of Chemistry Department at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in 2004. He started research in Nanotechnology/Analytical Chemistry as the first graduate student of Dr. Shumaker Parry in 2005. His Ph.D. study of unique, tunable infra-red plasmonic properties of nanocrescents resulted in three first-author publications in Nano Letters (among 10% of the most cited publications (2007)  in the most impactful journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the second most impactful journal in nanotechnology), ACS Nano and Analytical Chemistry. He has been working at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan since 2012. He is a farther of 5 survived children and he has broad and intense interests, including hiking and climbing and particularly hiking with kids (up to 6800+ m elevation) , traveling (87 countries and 307 UNESCO world Heritage sites) , reading of non-fiction literature, thinking.