Emeritus Professor Dr. Ainun Nishat

Professor Emeritus & Former Vice Chancellor of BRAC University
Water Resource and Climate Change Specialist

Prof. Dr. Ainun Nishat is an alumnus of Dept. of Civil Engineering at BUET. He is a prominent environmentalist and climate change specialist. He represented Bangladesh in numerous national and international bodies including the United Nations Climate Change Conferences (COP), Indo-Bangladesh Joint River Commission etc.

Prof. Nishat was born on 29th April 1948 in the Bajitpur upazilla in Kishorganj district. His father Gazi Shamsur Rahman was a prominent lawyer, legal expert, writer and TV personality in Bangladesh. Due to the posting of his father at different places of Bangladesh, Prof. Nishat attended many schools in different places such as Panchagarh, Bogura, Noakhali, Sylhet, Dinajpur before matriculating (SSC) form Dhaka Collegiate School in 1963. He attended Notre Dame College for a year and then went to Faridpur due to posting of his father and completed his intermediate (HSC) education from Rajendra College in 1965. He earned his bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from BUET in 1969. After graduating, he joined Water Development Board of Bangladesh as an Asst. Engr. Later, in 1972, he joined Department of Civil Engineering, BUET as a lecturer. After the establishment of the Department of Water Resource Engineering (WRE), he joined there as a faculty in 1975. He completed his master's in 1975. The title of his MSC thesis was Effect of Size and Unit Weight of Materials in Bank Protection. He went to the UK on a Commonwealth Scholarship and earned his PhD from the University of Strathclyde in 1981. The topic of his Ph. D. dissertation was A Study of Alluvial Channels in Regime. He became full professor in the Dept. of WRE in 1985. He retired from BUET in 1998 and worked as the Country Representative for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In 2010, he was appointed as the Vice-Chancellor of the BRAC University where he served till 2014. He is now an Emeritus Professor of BRAC University and working as an adviser at the Centre for Climate Change and Environmental Research (C3ER).