Zahurul Karim, elected to TWAS in 1998, and the former secretary in the government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh has been appointed president of the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences (BAS).
He is chairman of the Center for Agriresearch and Sustainable Environment and Entrepreneurship Development and specializes in agriculture, nutrition, and food systems. He has made considerable contribution to Bangladesh agriculture and sustainable environmental development, synthesizing, characterizing, and describing the formation of several iron minerals.
He was appointed the director-general of Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, and later became the executive chairman of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council. His awards include Outstanding Scientist (Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute) and a Commonwealth Scholarship (UK). Currently, he is working as an International Technical Advisor in the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
Yearul Kabir, elected to TWAS in 2023 and a former professor at the University of Dhaka (DU), has been elected secretary of BAS. He currently serves as an academic advisor at Bangladesh Maritime University.
He is a renowned expert in nutritional biochemistry, molecular genetics, cancer biology, and population genetics. He earned his MSc in biochemistry (1983) from the University of Dhaka, and completed his PhD in nutritional biochemistry (1990) at Tohoku University, in Japan.
In 1984, he joined as a lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (DU), where he was promoted to professor in December 1997. He served in this role until his retirement in January 2023.
He has authored 22 book chapters and published more than 140 research papers in reputed international journals. He is also a regular reviewer for several prestigious scientific journals worldwide.
He was a visiting scientist for short-term research under the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) at Tohoku University, in Japan (June–August 2025), and a JSPS-bridge fellow at the same institution (October–November 2012). Additionally, he served as a visiting scientist at the Federal Research Institute of Nutrition and Food in Karlsruhe, Germany (August 1998–March 1999).