Dr. Mohammad Shameem Al Mamun

Dr. Mohammad Shameem Al Mamun is a Bangladeshi tea scientist whose career, now approaching two decades, has been defined by a single question: how do we produce more tea, of better quality, without compromising the ecosystems that grow it? Born in Ghatail, Tangail in July 1978, he trained as an agriculturist at Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh, graduating with an Honours degree in Agriculture in 2001 and a First-Class Master’s in Entomology in 2005. From those foundations he moved into what would become his life’s work — the biology, ecology and management of tea pests in South Asian gardens.

He joined the Bangladesh Tea Research Institute (BTRI) in 2007 as a Scientific Officer and has served BTRI without interruption for eighteen years, rising through Senior Scientific Officer to his current appointment as Principal Scientific Officer (Entomology) and Head of the Entomology Division. Along the way he broadened his technical base far beyond his home discipline: a Post-Graduate Diploma in Tea Plantation Management from the Kothari Agricultural Management Centre in Tamil Nadu (First Class, Grade A+), a certified programme in Pollution-Free Tea Production Technology at Zhangzhou College in China, a PhD in Food Engineering & Tea Technology from Shahjalal University of Science & Technology, and — most recently — a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University in Climate-Smart Tea, completed in 2025 under a Bangladesh Climate Change Trust scholarship.

His research programme centres on integrated pest management, the distributional pattern and seasonal abundance of tea pests, bio-pesticides and bio-control, screening of tea clones for pest susceptibility, pesticide residue analysis and MRL compliance in made tea, and — increasingly — climate-smart adaptation strategies for tea. This work has produced an authorship record of one hundred and twenty-four publications, seventeen conference papers, six online papers and five books and book chapters, including a Springer chapter on tea production in Bangladesh and a landmark 504-page Bengali volume on the tea industry of the northern plains. Google Scholar records 621 citations, an h-index of 12 and an i10 index of 16; ResearchGate reports more than 89,000 reads.

Beyond the bench, Dr. Mamun has led at scale. As Project Director of the Northern Bangladesh Project under the Ministry of Commerce, he steered the expansion of tea cultivation into Panchagarh, and as Principal Investigator of the USAID-funded NATP-2 IPM sub-project he guided BTRI’s biological control research. He is a member of the Pesticide Technical Advisory Sub-Committee of the Ministry of Agriculture, focal point for the Climate Change Cell of the Directorate of Environment and convener of BTRI’s Bilashcherra Experimental Farm Steering Committee, among nineteen institutional roles.

His work has been recognised at home and abroad — the National Integrity Award 2022-2023, the International Scientist Award 2021 at Trivandrum, a top ranking in the AD Scientific Index 2024, the Best Innovation Award 2024 for the “Duti Pata Ekti Kuri” mobile app, and the Best Scientist Award 2025 from Scientific Laurels, Tamil Nadu. He founded Tea Shop Bangladesh to translate that research legacy into a public science platform: rigorous, transparent and rooted in the gardens themselves.