Research

My undergraduate years were full of field experiences when I have worked on several research projects on coastal biodiversity. In the beginning, I used to work voluntarily for seniors in their MS thesis sampling and along with time, these 4-5 hours of work uplifted me for doing science. I got lucky and at the end of my freshman year, I had the opportunity to work on a Ph.D. project funded by Wageningen University. That was the trigger, that was the turning point of me being an enthusiast of scientific research. Then I worked for the First Institute of Oceanography (FIO), China, and then IUCN, Bangladesh, and then WESTPAC. In my final year, I started working on my own research and brought myself into the world of sea jellies. Dr. Sharifuzzaman and his lab were interested in jellyfish of the Bay of Bengal. At that time I was curious about exclusively marine organisms such as starfish, sea cucumber, etc.  Then I thought why not jellyfish? 

There were two reasons why I choose to study jellyfish. First, at that time (till now) there was so little known about the jellyfish of Bangladesh. Only a few papers were published addressing cnidarians and some of those studies were obscure. Secondly, there were some reports of jellyfish occurrences coming from different coasts. Previously jellyfish bloom or occurrences were not that common on the Bangladeshi coast so it was clearly visible that the jellyfish population was soaring. So, I started learning jellyfish morphology,  worked on taxonomy and morphological identification of tunicates and scyphozoan species collected from our shore. Published work on my jellyfish research can be found in the Publication section