Mahfuza Islam

Research Scientist

Dr. Mahfuza Islam is an environmental health researcher with nearly two decades of experience designing and leading public health studies in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Mali. She holds a PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Islam spent more than 14 years at icddr,b, where she worked as an Assistant Scientist and contributed to over 15 projects on environmental exposures, WASH, nutrition, One Health, infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and child health. She later managed a large randomized trial on COVID-19 transmission as Senior Research Manager at Innovations for Poverty Action, Bangladesh. Her collaborators have included researchers at UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, and Johns Hopkins universities, as well as UNICEF.

Her expertise spans the full research process: developing study protocols and questionnaires, securing ethics approvals, managing budgets and field teams, assuring data quality, analyzing quantitative and qualitative data, communicating findings through publications and reports, and dissemination. She has authored or co-authored more than 30 peer-reviewed papers. She uses Stata, R, and SPSS to clean, analyze, and visualize data from RCT and observational studies. In qualitative research, she develops coding frameworks and analyzes interview and other text data using MAXQDA. She also uses ODK and SurveyCTO to build digital questionnaires, coordinate field data collection, and monitor data quality