Earlier today, Asel Isakova successfully defended her thesis, titled “Monetary Policy, Inflation and Dollarization in the Economies of Central Asia”. In doing so, she became CERGE-EI’s 100th PhD graduate since its founding. Asel came back to Prague to defend her thesis from London, where she is working at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Office of the Chief Economist as an Economic Analyst.
We sat down with Asel last week to conduct a short interview, during which she reflected on her academic work before coming to CERGE-EI in her native Kyrgyz Republic (at KRSU) and then at UPMF in Grenoble, France. Looking back in her 6 years at CERGE-EI, she remembered how demanding her first year was and also how much she benefitted from being able to spend time abroad on funded research visits to UPenn and CORE (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).