Dr. Md Shahabul Alam

• Position: Assistant Professor
• Department: Civil Engineering and Construction Management
• Office Location: FWB - Building 1, Room 152
• salam@uwf.edu
• Campus: 850.314.6920

Biography

Dr. Md. Shahabul Alam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Construction Management at the University of West Florida. He brings more than 15 years of international experience in research and the public sector, having worked as a Research Scientist, Postdoctoral Fellow, and Civil Engineer on multi-million-dollar projects in Bangladesh, Canada, and the United States. His professional work has spanned diverse areas, including the design and implementation of flood protection and drainage infrastructure, assessing the impacts of elevated water temperatures on salmon migration and reproduction, advancing continental-scale hydrologic modeling, supporting climate adaptation planning in transboundary river basins, and developing drought indices to inform water supply system planning and design.

Dr. Alam earned his B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), followed by a Master of Water Resources Engineering from KU Leuven and VU Brussels with a prestigious VLIRUOS scholarship. He also worked with the Bangladesh Water Development Board, where he last served as Sub-Divisional Engineer. In 2012, he moved to Canada and pursued M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil, Geological, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan with several scholarships, including the Saskatchewan Government Innovation Scholarship. He subsequently held positions as Postdoctoral Research Hydrologist with the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria, and later as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Scientist with the Alabama Water Institute (AWI) at the University of Alabama.

At AWI, Dr. Alam’s research focused on advancing large-scale hydrologic modeling as part of a national initiative to design, test, and implement the Next-Generation Water Resources Modeling Framework (NextGen). This effort, closely tied to the mission of the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH), seeks to enhance water prediction across the diverse landscapes of the United States. His work included deploying advanced hydrologic models on high-performance computing (HPC) systems and cloud platforms and serving as co-PI on projects such as “NextGen In A Box” to accelerate research-to-operations transitions. These efforts collectively improve national capabilities for simulating and forecasting water resources at multiple spatial and temporal scales.

Dr. Alam has published more than 15 journal articles in leading outlets such as the Journal of Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, delivered over 40 presentations at major international conferences, including AGU and EGU, and authored several technical reports. He has also developed open-source modeling and data analysis tools available on GitHub. His technical expertise spans programming (MATLAB, Python, R, C/C++), geospatial analysis (ArcGIS), hydrologic and water resources modeling (NextGen framework, SWAT, HEC-HMS, HEC-RAS), as well as high-performance and cloud computing (e.g., Amazon Web Services).

Degrees & Institutions

• Ph.D. Civil, Geological and Environmental Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
• M.Sc. Civil, Geological and Environmental Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
• Master of Water Resources Engineering, KU Leuven and VU Brussels, Belgium
• B.Sc. Civil Engineering, BUET

Research

Hydrologic modeling, extreme flood and drought prediction, model evaluation, and enhancing infrastructure resilience against natural hazards.

Special Interests

Explore and learn water resources management strategies around the world. 

Publications

1. Patel, A., Halgren, J.S., Wills, Z., Frazier, N., Lee, B., Cunningham, J., Laser, J., Karimiziarani, S., Patel, T., Romero, G., Denno, M., Lamont, S., Maghami, I., Jajula, H.T., Alam, M.S., Koriche, S.A., Singh, M., Minor, N., Duvvuri, B., Neisary, S.N., Lee, Q., Burian, S.J., Ogden, F.L., Bangalore, P., Carver, J., and Ames, D. (2025). NextGen In A Box (NGIAB): Open-source containerization of the NextGen Framework to enable community-driven hydrology modeling. Environmental Modelling Software, 106666. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106666

2. Neisary, S.N, Johnson, R., Alam, M.S., and Burian, S.J. (2025). A post-processing machine learning framework for bias-correcting National Water Model outputs by accounting for dominant streamflow drivers. Environmental Modeling and Software, 106459. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2025.106459.

3. Wu, L., Elshorbagy, A., and Alam, M.S. (2022). Dynamics of water-energy-food nexus interactions with climate change and policy options. Environ. Res. Commun., 4 015009. https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ac4bab.

4. Alam, M.S., Barbour, S.L., Mingbin, H., and Li, Y. (2020). Using statistical and dynamical downscaling to assess climate change impacts on mine reclamation cover water balances. Mine Water Environment, 39, 699-715. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10230-020-00695-6.

5. Alam, M.S., Barbour, S.L., and Mingbin, H. (2020). Characterizing uncertainty in the hydraulic parameters of oil sands mine reclamation covers and its influence on water balance predictions. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 24, 735–759.
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-735-2020.

6. Alam, M.S., Barbour, S.L., Elshorbagy, A., and Mingbin, H. (2018). The impact of climate change on the water balance of oil sands reclamation covers and natural soil profiles. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 19, 1731-1752. https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-17-0230.1.

7. Alam, M.S. and Elshorbagy, A. (2015). Quantification of the climate change-induced variations in Intensity-Duration-Frequency curves in the Canadian Prairies. Journal of Hydrology, 527, 990–1005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2015.05.059.

Publications in Review

Alam, M.S., Neisary, S.N, Johnson, R.J., Halgren, J.S., and Burian, S.J. (2025). Developing a model-agnostic evaluation framework for benchmarking hydrological models in predicting extreme flood and drought events. Journal of American Water Resources Association, In Review. https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.174426974.40948259/v1. 2.

Neisary, S.N., Alam, M.S., Aziz, D. and Burian, S.J. (2025). Multi-Year Hydrological Drought in the US: Distinct Natural and Anthropogenic Spatial and Temporal Patterns. Submitted to the Journal of the American Water Resources Association.

Patel, A., Halgren, J.S., Wills, Z., Frazier, N., Lee, B., Cunningham, J., Laser, J., Karimiziarani, S., Patel, T., Romero, G., Denno, M., Lamont, S., Maghami, I., Jajula, H.T., Alam, M.S., Koriche, S.A., Singh, M., Neisary, S.N., Lee, Q., Burian, S.J., Ogden, F.L., Bangalore, P., Carver, J., and Ames, D. (2025). NextGen In A Box (NGIAB): Advancing Community Modeling with the U.S. National Water Model. In Review, Environmental Modeling and Software.

Kshetri, T.B., Khatibi, A., Mok, Y., Alam, M.S., Liu, H., and Clark, M.P. (2024). Equifinality Contaminates the Sensitivity Analysis of Process-Based Snow Models. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussion. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-3049.