Fellow

Dr. Md. Shamsuzzoha Bayzid

(Associate Fellow, 2022)

Dr. Md. Shamsuzzoha Bayzid was born in 1985 to Md. Rafique Ullah and Shamsun Nahar.

Dr. Bayzid is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). He had his early eduction in Hazigonj Govt. Primary School, I.E.T. Govt. High School, and Dhaka College and had placed himself in the combined merit list in both SSC and HSC examinations. Dr. Bayzid received B.Sc. Engg. (CSE) and M.Sc. Engg. (CSE) from BUET in 2008 and 2010, respectively, and obtained the highest grade in his class. He was awarded a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016 and was advised by Prof. Tandy Warnow and Prof. Joydeep Ghosh, two of the prominent scientists in their fields of specialization. Notably, he received the International Fulbright Science and Technology PhD award from the U.S. Department of State and the Dean’s Excellence Award from the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin.

The overarching goal of Dr. Bayzid’s research is answering impactful biological questions, especially those related to the study of evolution, by developing algorithms that can accurately analyze very large genome-scale datasets. Dr. Bayzid has amply exhibited an ability to do original research in several areas in computational biology, bringing to bear a wide variety of novel algorithmic techniques, and an eagerness to work with domain experts and pick up and understand the real issues in bioinformatics and computational biology. He has collaborated with international teams of biologists, computer scientists, and statisticians on large scale data-driven projects. He was involved in one of the largest phylogenomics projects to date: the avian phylogenomics project, which sequenced genomes of 48 birds to resolve the evolutionary history of the modern birds (Jarvis et al., Science, 2015). He was the leading contributor towards developing accurate and scalable methods for analyzing such a big dataset by introducing a new concept called “binning”, which was used to reconstruct the avian phylogeny. His research has resulted in three publications in Science, and a number of publications in other high-impact journals. His research works have also appeared in top-tier conferences like RECOMB, RECOMB-CG, NeurIPS, GECCO, IROS, COCOON, WABI.

In recognition of his contributions, Dr. Bayzid has received a number of national and international awards. The Bangladesh Academy of Sciences (BAS) has honored him with the BAS Gold Medal for Junior Scientists in Physical Sciences in 2016. He has received the Interstellar Initiative award 2020 ― presented jointly by the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) and the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development ― which recognizes the world’s most promising Early Career Investigators. He also received the professional membership from NYAS. He was one of the invited young researchers at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (meeting with the Turing, Fields, Abel, and Nevanlinna Laureates) in 2017.

Dr. Bayzid’s contributions to computational biology, theory and algorithms, and machine learning have been widely recognized. His research is expected to contribute towards the betterment of the agriculture sector, disease analysis, and drug design in Bangladesh.