Dr Alifa Bintha Haque from Bangladesh has received WINGS Women of Discovery Award 2023. As part of the award, she is receiving unrestricted grants to further her critical work.
The award ceremony was held on October 12 in New York City, according to a press release.
Alifa is a board member of WildTeam and an assistant professor of zoology at Dhaka University.
“I was very humbled to receive this award – woman of discovery, the 100th flag carrier. I was very fortunate to have been named in the cohort with the chief scientist of ESRI, Dawn Wright, and the author of the 1st hotspot paper Cristina Mittermeier. It was such an honour,” Alifa said.
Alifa’s work focuses on conserving sharks and rays in the global south context. She earned her PhD from the Nature-based Solutions Initiative in the Department of Biology, Oxford, with the support of a Bangabandhu Scholarship. Her research, “Towards a socially just sustainable fishery preserving sharks and rays in the Bay of Bengal,” aims to prepare a sustainability model for the threatened species of sharks and rays in close conjunction with the fishing communities.
Alifa and her team have established the largest regional dataset on diversity, fisheries and trade, discovering highly threatened species of sharks and rays, including 15 new records.
An Edge of Existence Fellow and National Geographic Explorer, Alifa was selected for the 2023 cohort of the Edinburgh Ocean Leaders Programme and awarded the best student presentation at Sharks International 2022 for her talk, “Can fishers be the conservation heroes we need them to be?”
