Alfiya Abekova was born in 1969 in Kazakhstan, Almaty region, Kazakhstan. She graduated from the Kazakh Agricultural Institute in 1996 and defended her Ph.D. thesis in 2005. From 1987 to the present, she works in the laboratory of biotechnology of the Kazakh Research Institute of Agriculture and Plant Growing, Almaty Region, Kazakhstan. Her research interests include the physiological and biochemical aspects of wheat biofortification and mutation selection.