Bangladeshi origin scientist Shafiqul Islam wins Prince Sultan prize for water

Bangladeshi-American scientist Shafiqul Islam and his team have won the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW).

The Saudi Crown Prince introduced the awards in 2002 to reward scientific efforts contributing to sustainable availability of potable water and address the global issue of water scarcity.

The team of Rita Colwell of University of Maryland and Islam of Tufts University has been awarded this year's creativity prize for developing and testing a model that uses chlorophyll information from satellite data to predict cholera outbreaks at least three to six months in advance.

The awards ceremony will be held at the UN Headquarters in New York on Nov 2, the PSIPW said on its website.

The prize is shared by two teams this year.

Peter J Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology, USA is the other recipient for his work on ocean-atmosphere interactions and their effect on monsoon strength, which is used to provide one to two-week lead time forecasts of monsoonal floods.

A Civil Engineering graduate from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Shafiul completed his Phd from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

A professor at the Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Tufts University, he also heads the Water Diplomacy Programme at the university.

He maintains an active international consulting and training practice, including national water planning in Bangladesh and flood forecasting in India.

In 2012, the team of Bangladeshi scientist Abu Borhan Mohammad Badruzzaman of BUET and Charles Franklin Harvey of the MIT was awarded the PSIPW Groundwater Prize.

The award was given for developing a model for understanding and preventing the arsenic contamination of groundwater.