Professors Mahsud Saimdinov and Farukh Sharopov are the only scientists from Tajikistan included in Stanford University’s prestigious “World’s Top 2% Scientists – 2025” list.
The ranking, compiled under the guidance of renowned Stanford epidemiologist Professor John Ioannidis, assesses the scientific productivity and impact of researchers worldwide. Conducted annually since 2019, it analyzes data from more than 100,000 scientists across disciplines using the Scopus (Elsevier) database.
In 2025, just two researchers from Tajikistan, Farukh Sharopov and Mahsud Saimdinov, were included in the top 2% of global scientists based on their citation impact and publication record.
Researchers in the 98th percentile or above in their field qualify for inclusion.
Farukh Sharopov: Pioneer in Pharmaceutical Chemistry
Born in 1976, Farukh Safolbekovich Sharopov is among Tajikistan’s leading chemists. A graduate of the Chemistry Department at the Tajik State University (1998), he defended his doctoral dissertation at the V. I. Nikitin Institute of Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan in 2002.
Sharopov has held positions as a senior and leading researcher at the Institute of Chemistry and has taught at the Abu Ali ibn Sina Medical University. Since 2019, he has served as a senior researcher at the China-Tajikistan Innovation Center for Natural Products.
In October 2025, he successfully defended a doctoral dissertation titled “Chemical Study of Secondary Metabolites of Essential Oil Plants Using Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry.”
According to Scopus data as of October 14, 2025, Sharopov has authored 105 publications, which have been cited 6,881 times. He holds an h-index of 40 and ranks 692nd globally in the pharmaceutical and biomolecular chemistry field.
Mahsud Saimdinov: Global Leader in Nanotechnology
Mahsud Ismatboevich Saimdinov, born in 1988 in Isfara, is recognized internationally for his contributions to nanotechnology. A graduate and postgraduate of Lomonosov Moscow State University, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, served as a visiting researcher at MIT, and taught at the University of Toronto.
Currently, he holds a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Advanced Functional Materials and is a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria in Canada.
According to Scopus, Saimdinov has published 170 scientific papers, which have received 24,886 citations. His h-index stands at 69. In the category of nano and nanotechnologies, he ranks 630th globally, placing him among the field’s top-tier scientists.
