Dr Saiful Karim is an Associate Professor and the Leader of the Ocean Governance Research Group (OGRG) at the Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. He was the McDougall Visiting Professor in International Law at West Virginia University where he taught a course on international climate change Law. Dr Karim has held Visiting Faculty position at Sydney University where he taught a postgraduate course on Asia Pacific Environmental Law. He was a consultant at the University of the South Pacific. He was a visiting research fellow at the National University of Singapore. He practiced at a Singapore law firm. He was a lawyer of Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA).
Dr Karim teaches and researches in different areas of ocean, environmental and agricultural law. He has published extensively in the fields of ocean and environmental law and has presented research papers in many conferences and workshops organised by various academic and research organisations based in Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania. Dr Karim is the author of Prevention of Pollution of the Marine Environment from Vessels: The Potential and Limits of the International Maritime Organisation (Springer, 2015), Maritime Terrorism and the Role of Judicial Institutions in the International Legal Order (Brill-Nijhoff, 2017) and Shipbreaking in Developing Countries: A Requiem for Environmental Justice from the Perspective of Bangladesh (Routledge, 2018).
The Australian Government nominated Dr Karim in various important global expert bodies. He is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC). He is also a lead author of the first Global Assessment and the first Asia Pacific Regional Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Dr Karim is the recipient of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law 2018 Scholarship Award for his outstanding contribution in interdisciplinary research of environmental law.