Maqsudul Alam

Maqsudul Alam (14 December 1954 – 20 December 2014) was a Bangladeshi life scientist known for leading genome-sequencing projects on papaya, rubber, jute and a jute-attacking fungus. A professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, he brought his genomics work back to Bangladesh, where the decoding of the jute genome in 2010 made him a national figure. ¹

Alam was born on 14 December 1954 in Madaripur, Faridpur, in what was then East Pakistan. His father, Dalil Uddin Ahmed, an officer of the East Pakistan Rifles, was killed in the Liberation War of 1971; his mother was a teacher and social worker. After schooling at Government Laboratory High School and Dhaka College, he took a master's degree in microbiology from Moscow State University in 1979 and a first PhD there in 1982, then a second PhD in biochemistry from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Germany in 1987. ¹

After research posts in Moscow and at Washington State University, Alam joined the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 1992, became a full professor in 2001, and founded its Advanced Studies in Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics programme in 2003. That year his team sequenced the genome of the deep-sea bacterium Idiomarina loihiensis; in 2007–08 he worked on the genome of the transgenic papaya grown in Hawaii, and from 2009 he directed the Centre for Chemical Biology at Universiti Sains Malaysia, where his team sequenced the rubber tree. ¹

In 2009 Alam joined Bangladesh's Basic and Applied Research on Jute project as principal investigator. His team published the genome of tossa jute in 2010 — announced publicly by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina — then that of the jute-attacking fungus Macrophomina phaseolina in 2012 and of white jute in 2013, work intended to breed disease-resistant varieties of Bangladesh's historic cash crop. ¹

Alam died of cirrhosis of the liver at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, on 20 December 2014, and was buried at Hawaii Memorial Park Cemetery. In 2016 the Government of Bangladesh awarded him the Independence Day Award posthumously, and the University of Hawaii Foundation created a graduate research award in his name. ¹

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