Professor Md. Shariful Islam teaches Political Science at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He served as a Commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission of Bangladesh, holding the status of a Justice of the High Court Division of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh. He also served as a Member of the National Independent Inquiry Commission tasked with inquiring into the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) Massacre, with the status of a Justice of the High Court Division. Both appointments were made by the Interim Government of Bangladesh, led by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus.

Professor Islam served as an International Scholar-in-Residence at Monmouth University, New Jersey, where he taught global human rights and social justice issues. He was a guest faculty member at Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea, where he taught human rights and comparative politics.

He studied Religious Pluralism and Public Presence in the US at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as a US State Department scholar. He was also a Democracy and American Political Process fellow of the US State Department in Washington, DC. He holds a Master of Laws (LL.M) in Human Rights from the University of Hong Kong, where he was a Sohmen Human Rights scholar, and a Master of Social Sciences (MSS) in Political Science from the University of Dhaka, with distinction.

Professor Islam has edited Human Rights and Governance: Bangladesh (Hong Kong: ALRC, 2013), a comprehensive work on human rights issues in Bangladesh, and authored Politics–Corruption Nexus in Bangladesh: An Empirical Study of the Impacts on Judicial Governance (Hong Kong: ALRC, 2010), a detailed examination of the relationship between politics and corruption in the country's judicial system.

His research and scholarly interests encompass human rights, judicial governance, comparative politics, US-Bangladesh relations and Bay of Bengal affairs, with particular emphasis on the intersections of law, institutions, public policy, and regional geopolitics.