About me

I grew up in a coastal city in Bangladesh, where hurricanes (locally known as cyclones) are common phenomena. In 1991, my hometown was destroyed by a category 5 hurricane which made me interested in studying natural hazards. I received my BS from Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET) with a major in Urban and Regional Planning. Then, I obtained my PhD from Texas Tech University in Land Use Planning with a specialization on natural hazards management. My dissertation entitled "Integrated Approach to Cyclone Wind Analysis and Disaster Planning for the Bangladesh Coast", for which I developed a landfalling tropical cyclone cilmatology, estimated maximum wind and surge height in different coastal locations, and then analyzed risks and vulnerabilities in coastal regions. During my graduate studies at Texas Tech, I worked as a Research Assistant in the Wind Science and Engineering Research Center, which is a leading authority in windstorm research that developed the Enhanced Fujita Scale and Storm safe rooms for tornado/hurricane protection currently used by FEMA. 

After my PhD, I received a Postdoctoral Fellowship jointly from the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) and Texas A&M University's marine campus in Galveston. At Texas A&M, I studied the Gulf of Mexico hurricanes that made landfall on the Texas coastline from emergency plannning perspective. Interestingly, while I was doing that research in 2008, Hurricane Ike devastated Galveston as well as our home on the island. Although Ike was a category 2 hurricane at landfall, the experience was much worse than in 1991.

In 2009, I joined the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Environmental Cooperative Science Center, headquartered in Tallahassee, Florida. At that time the Director of the center was Dr. Larry Robinson, who was later appointed as the Assistant Secretary of Commerce (NOAA).

I joined JSU in Fall 2011 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Emergency Management. I live in Jacksonville, Alabama with my wife Farzana and our sweet little daughter Zinan.