Dr. Rumana Islam

Dr. Rumana Islam (on leave) is a Professor of Law at the University of Dhaka. She served as the first female Commissioner of Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) from May 2022 to August 2024. Professor Islam joined Dhaka University as a faculty in 2008 as an Assistant Professor. She was nominated as a Panel Arbitrator designated by the Government of Bangladesh to the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in April 2021 for a term of six years. She completed her LLB (Hons) and LL.M from the University of Dhaka with first class in both. She earned another LL.M (specialization in commercial law) from the University of Cambridge, UK with a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Scholarship in 2006 and obtained her doctoral degree from the University of Warwick in 2015 with Commonwealth Scholarship. During her PhD, she also obtained Charles Wallace Bangladesh Trust Doctoral Bursary, in 2013. Her seminal work on the Fair and Equitable Treatment (FET) standard has been published as a book titled “Fair and Equitable Treatment in International Investment Arbitration: Developing Countries in Context” (Springer, 2018). She has published journal articles on various issues at home and abroad. She has participated and presented papers in international roundtable discussions, seminars, symposiums, and conferences held in India, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, the Netherlands, the USA, the UK, and China. She is also an alumnus of the Scholars Workshop (2011) of the Institute of Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at Harvard Law School. She has acted as the Assistant Director of Research (Law) (part-time) at Bangladesh Institute for Law and International Affairs (BILIA), the leading think tank of law in the country from September 2015 to September 2019. Her administrative experience includes serving as House Tutor (part-time) in Ruqayyah Hall, University of Dhaka for more than eight years and as a Subwarden at Cryfield Halls of Residence at the University of Warwick from September 2011 to March 2015. She also taught at the Warwick School of Law as a Seminar Tutor during 2011-2012. She served as a consultant in different research projects by the Faculty of Law, University of Dhaka; University Grants Commission (UGC), Ministry of Law, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), and UNDP. She is an affiliated expert of the Asia Pacific FDI network and a founding committee member of the South Asian Economic Law Network (SAELN). Her areas of interest include international investment law, developing countries in investment arbitration, commercial arbitration, and third-world approaches to international law.