Shafiqul (Shafik) Islam is professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a professor of water diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the director of the Water Diplomacy Program. He works on availability, access, and allocation of water within the context of climate challenges, health, and diplomacy. Shafiqul’s research interests include water diplomacy, hydroclimatology, hydroepidemiology, remote sensing, and climate challenges.
He is noted for interdisciplinary approaches to create actionable knowledge by blending science, engineering, policy, and politics using methods and tools from complexity science, systems thinking, principled pragmatism, and negotiation theory. Islam maintains a diverse network of national and international partnerships and is engaged in several national and international consulting and training practices in the United States, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Shafiqul is a 2020 Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the 2016 recipient of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Water Prize for Creativity. He has over one hundred journal publications and four books on water diplomacy. His research and practice have been featured in numerous media outlets, including the BBC World Service, Voice of America, the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, Nature, and Yale E360.
Shafiqul participated in the 2005 EPIIC professional workshop on “Water as a Source of Conflict and Cooperation: Exploring the Potential,” which helped lead to the development of the Tufts Water Diplomacy Initiative.
We are close personal friends and refer to one another as “bunkie,” having shared a bunk bed room at the Appalachian Mountain Club EPIIC Outward Bound weekend during the EPIIC Oil and Water year when he was one of our guest lecturers.
His daughter Maia Majumder was my TA and student in EPIIC’s Global Health and Security colloquium and symposium. I had the honor of being the lead toast and escort for Maia at her wedding.
Maia, an extraordinary young computational epidemiologist, .was a panelist in our Convisero webinar on the Human Impact of Covid-19. She is playing a significant role in the Moderna vaccine trials.