Professor Md Shariful Islam teaches Political Science at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. 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.

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 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 (first class).

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.

Since December 2024, Professor Islam has been on deputation as a Member — holding the status of a Supreme Court Judge (High Court Division) — of the National Independent Inquiry Commission on the BDR massacre, constituted by the interim government of Bangladesh under the leadership of Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus.