The Powder Technology research group and the Department of Industrial Engineering (DIIN) of the University of Salerno are strongly affected and deeply saddened by the sudden and accidental death of Assem Zharbossyn, a PhD student in Industrial Engineering, happened in the evening of January 17th, 2023.

Assem Zharbossyn was the holder of a scholarship provided as part of the TUSAIL project. The project, selected and funded by the European Commission, involves, in addition to the University of Salerno, five other prestigious European universities and five leading companies in the industrial sector. The project provides for the training of fifteen early-stage researchers aiming at a PhD title on topics concerning the modelling of systems made up of particles, with particular attention to their upscaling representation. For this type of project (Marie Curie-Sklodowska Doctoral Training Network) the European Commission forces universities to recruit foreign students and requires a training program with a very high degree of international mobility.

Assem was hired by the University of Salerno for the TUSAIL project in 2021, after being selected from a group of over ten foreign candidates, winning the scholarship for the quality of her university studies curriculum, for the results of her first research carried out during the Master's Degree in Chemical and Materials Engineering, obtained at the University of Nazarbayev (Kazakhstan), and for the critical skills highlighted during the selection process. Her research activity at the DIIN Laboratories of the University of Salerno involved both experiments and numerical modelling. In the last year of her work, Assem was collecting a large amount of experimental data that she was supposed to use to support the modelling activity during the second part of the PhD, to be carried out at the University of Twente in the Netherlands starting from February 2023.

Assem was a young woman with kind manners, seriously committed to work, ready to support her colleagues, eager to learn from teachers and more experienced colleagues, and highly motivated to complete her scientific training. Her presence as a young researcher and as a generous and modest person will be deeply missed by her PhD colleagues and by the professors who got to know her

Pubblicato il 18 Gennaio 2023