Nicholas Sims-Williams

After studying Old and Middle Iranian languages and related subjects at Cambridge, Nicholas Sims-Williams has spent his entire career at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where his teaching has covered seven Iranian languages (Avestan, Old Persian, Middle Persian, Parthian, Bactrian, Sogdian, and Khotanese) and occasionally Syriac. Although he has published on all of these languages, he has concentrated in particular on the Middle Iranian languages of Eastern Iran and Central Asia, taking an equal interest in the languages themselves, with their Indo-European roots, and in their Central Asian setting, with its stimulating mixture of languages, cultures, and religions. His books include editions of Sogdian inscriptions from Northern Pakistan, documents in mixed Sogdian and Old Turkish from Chinese Xinjiang, and Bactrian documents from Northern Afghanistan. At present he is working on a catalogue of the Christian Sogdian and New Persian manuscript fragments in the Berlin Turfan collection.

http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff31816.php