Outstanding achievement

A Bangladeshi-American scientist and his team member have won the prestigious Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) this year for developing and testing a model that predicts cholera outbreaks.

Dr Shafiqul Islam of Tufts University, USA, and Dr Rita Colwell of University of Maryland at College Park won the 7th PSIPW award in Creative Prize category, according to the official website of PSIPW.

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The PSIPW in its website said the team received the award for “developing and testing a model that uses chlorophyll information from satellite data to predict cholera outbreaks at least three to six months in advance.”

The winners were announced on October 5, and the awards ceremony would be held on November 2 at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Shafiqul applied Rita Colwell's findings to relate chlorophyll levels and cholera outbreaks in the Bay of Bengal, said the PSIPW website.

The model has been tested with chlorophyll information from satellites over the Bay of Bengal region to predict cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh.

The team is currently working on testing the model with ground-based observations, the website said.

According to the Tufts University website, Shafiqul Islam is professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and professor of Water Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.

He was the first Bernard M Gordon Senior Faculty Fellow in Engineering at Tufts University.

Rita Colwell is an internationally acclaimed oceanographer and microbiologist, who has spent the bulk of her career studying the V Cholera bacterium that causes cholera, said the PSIPW website.

The creativity prize is shared by two teams this year. Dr Peter J Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, was the other recipient of the prize for his work on ocean-atmosphere interactions and their effect on monsoon strength, which is used to provide one to two-week lead time forecasts of monsoonal floods that often provoke catastrophic inundations in highly populated coastal regions.