Your Namak for Friday, July 22
Armenia to pull out troops from Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers meet in Tbilisi, and CIA director makes surprise visit to Armenia.
Hi there, here’s your weekly briefing of Armenian news in English, curated, reported and fact-checked by journalists Astrig Agopian and Maral Tavitian.
Armenia to Pull Out Troops from Nagorno-Karabakh
Armenia’s Security Council Secretary Armen Grigoryan announced that Armenia would remove all its military troops from Nagorno-Karabakh by September. The conscripts deployed there will return to Armenia and will not be replaced. The Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army and the Russian peacekeeping forces will be in charge of guaranteeing the security of Armenians in the region. “After the establishment of the ceasefire and the deployment of the peacekeeping contingent of the Russian Federation, the withdrawal of the units of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh is logical,” Grigoryan said.
Armenian and Azerbaijani Foreign Ministers Meet in Tbilisi
On July 16, Ararat Mirzoyan and Jeyhun Bayramov met in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, hosted by their Georgian counterpart Ilia Darchiashvili, to discuss the normalization process between the two countries following the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. According to a statement published by the Armenia Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mirzoyan reiterated “the position of the Armenian side that the political settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is essential within the process of achieving sustainable and lasting peace in the region and stressed the importance of using the institution and experience of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship in accordance with its international mandate.” The Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the meeting did not produce concrete outcomes. “Concrete results are never achieved by the first round of negotiations. This case is not an exception,” Darchiashvili said in an interview with Moambe news.
CIA Director Makes Surprise Visit to Armenia
On July 15, CIA Director William Burns made an unannounced visit to Armenia and was received by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. In a brief statement, Pashinyan’s office said the two “discussed issues related to international and regional security and the fight against terrorism. Reference was made to processes taking place in the South Caucasus region.” Neither the Armenian nor American authorities have provided any additional comments about the meeting. The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, met with Pashinyan three days after Burns made his unexpected visit to Armenia, the first in history by a CIA director.
Lilit Nersisyan: Meet a scientist trying to bridge the fields of informatics and biology in Armenia
“I think developing bioinformatics is crucial because it develops a competitive edge in Armenia. Given our resources, I think it’s the way to go for us, to matter in the world.”
Lilit Nersisyan is sharp and patient. Not only does the 32-year-old biologist grasp the most complex scientific concepts, but she also explains them with impressive clarity, which makes her interlocutor think it’s easy.
Born and raised in Yerevan, Lilit was attracted to science from an early age. In fourth grade, her love of nature led her to discover the fields of ecology and biology. “My parents were against it, because both of them had a scientific background and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they struggled a lot, like many people of their profession,” she says.
Nevertheless, Lilit pursued the field of biology and expanded her knowledge and skills. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biophysics from Yerevan State University in 2010, a master’s degree in biotechnology from the Armenian Academy of Science in 2012, a computer science master’s degree from the American University of Armenia in 2013, followed by a PhD in bioinformatics at the Institute of Molecular Biology of Armenia, which she defended at the University of Leipzig, in Germany.
As if her impressive CV was not long enough, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Sweden at the Karolinska Institutet for several years, was the principal investigator of three research grants, before founding the Armenian Bioinformatics Institute one year ago.
“I never really wanted to leave, I like living in Armenia. But I understood that you need to go abroad in order to gain knowledge and experience and to bring it back here,” Lilit says. “That’s valid for every country, not just us.”
The young scientist wanted to create an institute to bridge the fields of biology and computer science. Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field where people write algorithms and software tools to analyze the data that comes from labs, as she explains it.
“If you have a group of people who have a certain disease and a group of people who do not, you want to understand why,” Lilit says. “What we can do now is to look in the genomes, the sequence encoded in our DNA, and we can try to read billions of letters and analyze them. The knowledge we have in biology and algorithms and technology can help us be faster and more efficient in the processing of the data.”
Lilit is basically building an institute from scratch with a small team. “I think developing bioinformatics is crucial because it develops a competitive edge in Armenia,” she says. “Given our resources, I think it’s the way to go for us, to matter in the world. You just need to have computers and brains, we have that.”
Lilit has also noticed benefits related to the small size of Armenia. She says people in the tech and biology sectors can easily exchange ideas and facilitate collaborative projects.
Developing educational opportunities for the next generation of Armenian scientists and researchers is also one of Lilit’s goals. The Institute organizes summer schools, internships and other events and workshops.
“We have a lot of talent accumulated at the bachelor’s level, but then there are no more post-graduate opportunities for them, so this is when we lose people,” the biologist says. “They have to join the IT sector or go abroad because there are no research projects to keep them in Armenia. So we have to create those and that is what I am trying to do.”
If there’s one takeaway from Lilit’s work –– science is cool. She wants to share her love of bioinformatics with the next generation, and use it to open up Armenia to the world.
To read: Fleeing Putin, Russian tech workers find a home in Armenia, an article profiling Russian tech workers who have moved to Armenia following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The feature was reported by Rest of World, a digital publication exploring the intersection of technology and the human experience “beyond the Western bubble.”
To discover: 4plus, a documentary photography center based in Yerevan. You can discover multimedia stories on the website, order prints, and if you’re in the capital, attend exhibitions or workshops.
To read: Armenia Faces Demographic Risks, an article by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting about Armenia’s depopulation challenges. In the first quarter of 2022, the number of deaths registered in Armenia exceeded births by 609 people, the first decline of its kind since 1998.
That’s it for today, see you next week!
Questions? Story ideas? An urge to say barev/parev? You can send us a secure email at namaknews@protonmail.com.