Yedige Magauin is the director of RFE/RL's Kazakh Service. He joined RFE/RL as a local correspondent for the Kazakh service in 1992, becoming the Almaty Bureau Chief in 1994, and moving to Prague as a staff member in 1995. His writing has focused on wide range of issues from energy policy to cultural matters in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. In 1993 he gained an exclusive interview with President Nursultan Nazarbayev, marking the first time the leader of the newly formed Kazakh state had been interviewed by RFE/RL. In 1999, Yedige was a visiting scholar at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 2005 he spent several weeks at Stanford University furthering his research on Islamic identity in Central Asia.
MA in Oriental Studies, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, 1992; PhD in Philology/Cultural Anthropology, Kazakh Academy of Science, 1995