Professor Dr. Md. Zaidul Islam Sarker who obtained his Ph.D from University Science Malaysia in 2003 started his career as a research associate in Tohoku University at the Research Center of Supercritical Fluids (Sendai, Japan) from 2003 to 2005. In 2005, he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for conducting research at the National Food and Agricultural Research Organization at Hokkaido, Japan. In 2007, he joined the University Putra Malaysia as an Associate Professor. In 2010, he joined as a Professor at the International Islamic Unive rsity Malaysia (IIUM) where he is presently working at the Department of Pharmaceutical Technology, Faculty of Pharmacy.
During the past two years, he has held the position of Head of Research, the Faculty of Pharmacy. Professor Sarker is currently engaged in many international collaborations and consultancies. In 2015 he was a visiting professor of the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at King Saudi University, Riyadh, under the Ministry of Higher Education of Saudi Arabia. Professor Sarker has supervised 15 postgraduate (M.Sc & Ph.D) students as a main and co-supervisor, and currently, he is supervising seven PhD and three M.Sc students. He has supervision experience of three postdoctoral fellows and several research assistants, and is supporting five graduate research assistants in his research grants. Professor Sarker recently secured several research grants under Fundamental (FRGS), Exploratory (ERGS) and Prototype (PRGS) Research Grant Scheme as a Principal Researcher of the Ministry of Education (MOE) Malaysia.
Professor Sarker’s speciality is in food science and he has an interest in developing nutritional foods through processing or isolation of natural products that can have pharmacological value. He has expertise in supercritical fluid extraction, marine food products, food processing and food properties, bioactive compounds, fats and oils, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical formulations and rheological properties with over 250 publications in ISI and Scopus indexed journals, patents, books, reports and presentations at international conferences. Professor Sarker was the winner of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Young Scientist Award at PACIFICHEM 2010 and the Gold Medal Winner as the main and a co-inventor in several exhibitions at the national level including the Malaysia Technology Expo 2014 (MTE-2014). Professor Sarker won the Outstanding Researcher Award at the university level in 2013 and 2014.