Dr. Yerlan ZHIYENBAYEV completed his undergraduate studies in the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Khoja Akhmet Yassawi International Kazakh-Turkish University (AYU) in Turkistan, Kazakhstan, between 1998 and 2002. In 2002, he began working as a lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages at AYU’s Taraz Institute. In 2004, he continued his academic career as a lecturer in the Department of Turkish Language at AYU's Preparatory Faculty in Turkistan. Between 2003 and 2005, he pursued his master’s degree in Kazakh Linguistics at AYU and successfully defended his thesis titled “The Semantics of Adjectives Formed with the Colors White, Blue, and Red in Kazakh and Turkish” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Meyirbek Yerzhanov.
In 2009, he was awarded a scholarship by the Board of Trustees of AYU and began his doctoral studies in the field of Modern Turkish Literature at Gazi University. He completed and successfully defended his PhD dissertation in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Şerif Aktaş and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ayfer Yılmaz. His thesis was entitled “Structure and Themes in the Poetry of Kazakh Poet Magzhan Zhumabayev.” On November 8, 2018, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan officially recognized and validated his doctoral degree in literature.
Between 2016 and 2018, Dr. Zhi yenbayev worked as a researcher at the Institute of Turkology at AYU. Since 2016, he has been serving as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Turkish Philology at the Faculty of Philology of AYU.
In the academic year 2024–2025, he participated in an international academic internship program in the field of Management of Education at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. This internship was funded by the Bolashak International Scholarship Program, granted by the Ministry of Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Dr. Zhiyenbayev has authored more than 50 academic publications, including conference proceedings, symposia, peer-reviewed journals, and book chapters indexed in databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Elsevier. His research interests include Modern Turkish Literature, comparative linguistics, semantics of colors in language, Kazakh–Turkish language relations, folklore, and the history of Turkish-Islamic art.

e-mail: yerlan.zhiyenbayev@ayu.edu.kz