From sketching cities on tracing paper in Khulna to studying how settlements, roads, and ecosystems change together at a planetary scale.
I grew up sketching cities on tracing paper in Khulna and now spend my days writing the code and designing the functionalities that help other people analyze them. My research traces how urban expansion and road networks reshape landscapes, and what that change means for the species and people sharing those landscapes.
At Esri I work, in geospatial R&D, applying spatial analysis to questions about urban planning, service delivery, and beyond. In parallel, I publish on global biodiversity loss, protected-area isolation, and infrastructure exposure to climate hazards. The two halves feed each other — the applied work keeps the academic questions grounded, and the academic work keeps the applied work asking the right things.
Methodologically, my work sits at the convergence of land change modeling, machine learning, statistical modeling, and large-scale spatial analysis. Across projects, I lean on spatial, econometric, and statistical, machine-learning-based approaches to land-cover classification, statistical and AI-based flood susceptibility modeling, and large process models for urban–transportation coevolution. The common thread is a preference for models that take spatial structure seriously, communicate uncertainty honestly, and remain interpretable.
Recent collaborators include Burak Güneralp and Lee A. Fitzgerald at Texas A&M, M Mahbub Hossain at the University of Houston, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Human Geography Group. I co-convene the AGU Urban Area and Global Change session in 2026.
Before joining Esri in 2024, I completed a PhD in Geography at Texas A&M, advised by Burak Güneralp. My dissertation produced one of the first large, global-scale road network growth models, work that was featured in AGU's Eos magazine. Earlier, I completed two master's degrees from Iowa State, one in Community and Regional Planning and one in Transportation, with a graduate certificate in GIS along the way. My undergraduate degree in Urban and Rural Planning is from Khulna University. The planning identity runs underneath everything I do.
I am Bangladeshi, married, and live in the United States. My wife and I travel whenever we can (mostly in Nature). Exploring the National Parks and going to all of the parks before turning 40 is one of the bucket list items for me.