Late National Professor Dr. Jamilur Reza Choudhury

摘要

National Professor Dr. Jamilur Reza Choudhury was an internationally recognized civil engineer,educationist, researcher, and administrator. He was the most eminent personality in the engineeringcommunity of Bangladesh who made a great impact on science and technical education, engineeringprofession, and national development, particularly development of the infrastructure and IT sectors ofBangladesh.Prof. J R Choudhury was born to Mrs. Hayatun Nessa Choudhury (1922-2010) and Engr. Abid RezaChoudhury (1905-1991) in Sylhet on 15th November 1943. He had his early education inMymensingh Zilla School and later moved to Dhaka where he attended Nawabpur Government HighSchool and St. Gregory’s High School and completed his matriculation in 1957. He completed hisintermediate education from Dhaka College in 1959. Prof. Choudhury earned his bachelor’s degree inCivil Engineering from EPUET (Present BUET) in 1963 securing first class first position with honorsand joined the Civil Engineering Department as a Lecturer in the same year. He then went to theUniversity of Southampton (UK) in 1964 with a Scholarship and earned his master’s degree inadvanced structural engineering in 1965 and then PhD in 1968 working on Shear Wall andStructural Analysis of High Rise Building. As an outcome of his PhD research he developed asimplified method for analysis of shear walls in tall buildings commonly known as Coull andChoudhury’s Method, which has been widely used all over the world. On returning to Bangladesh, hecontinued to serve as a teacher at BUET. In 1975, he was offered the Commonwealth StaffFellowship to pursue his post-doctoral studies at the University of Surrey (UK), where he spent a yearas a visiting Associate Professor. In 1976, he was appointed as a full Professor of Civil Engineeringat BUET. He served as the Head of the Dept. of Civil Engineering, BUET for the periods of 1978–79 and 1981–83. He also served as the Dean of the Faculty of Civil Engineering during the period of1983-85. Upon his retirement from BUET in 2001, Prof. Choudhury was appointed as the ViceChancellor of the BRAC University, Dhaka where he served till 2010. Since 2012, he served as theVice-Chancellor of the University of Asia-Pacific in Dhaka.