Senior advisor
Dr. Erkin Sidick was born in Aksu City of East Turkestan. After earning his BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Xinjiang University in 1983, he served as a university lecturer, and a domestic and international visiting scholar in China and Japan until 1988. After that he came to the US, earned his Master’s degree in Physics, his PhD degree in electrical engineering in 1995 from the University of California, Davis, worked as a post-doc at Sandia National Laboratories (CA) for 1.5 years, and alsoworked in 3 different high-tech companies in Silicon Valley of California before joining NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in January 2004. He is currently working as a Senior Optical Engineer on various space telescope projects. He has authored and/or co-authored 108 publications, including journal papers, book chapters, conference presentations, and has 3 patents.
Dr. Sidick also wrote several hundred articles in Uyghur language on personal development, bilingual education, child education, leadership, religion, western educational systems, and work at NASA, and published those articles in Uyghur websites in East Turkestan until all the Uyghur websites were closed down in early 2017. With those articles as the main contents, Dr. Sidick prepared 15 books, and 7 of them have been printed. He published the remaining 8 books in PDF format. Starting from early 2018, Dr. Sidick gave more than 50 lectures in the US and around the world on the current Uyghur tragedies and Chinese government’s genocide of the Uyghurs in both Uyghur language and English. He has traveled to many countries giving lectures, including Turkey, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Japan and Canada. He was selected as one of the senior advisors to WUC in 2018, and he has been very active in that position since then. In 2019, he founded with his several friends a non-profit organization, Uyghur Projects Foundation (UPF, uyghursfoundation.org), and is serving as its president since then. UPF has been funding various projects to preserve and protect Uyghur language, cultural and ethnic identity among the Uyghurs in diaspora. Last year, UPF established Uyghur Information Center, which runs an English-language website (uyghurinfo.org) and produces three video programs per week in Uyghur. So far it has produced 72 video programs. Dr. Sidick also has a personal YouTube channel and four Facebook accounts, and produces weekly video programs on issues closely related to the current Uyghur tragedy.