A laboratory in Dhaka has been measuring the air over Bangladesh for more than twenty years. Until recently, almost none of that was visible to anyone outside it.
The Laboratory
The Atmospheric and Environmental Chemistry Research Laboratory at the University of Dhaka is one of the pioneering atmospheric chemistry groups in Bangladesh, and among the well-established ones in South Asia. It is led by Professor Abdus Salam, who also supervised my thesis, and its peer-reviewed record runs back to 2003.
The subject is not abstract. Dhaka’s yearly average fine particulate pollution rose from 83 to 103 micrograms per cubic metre between 2018 and 2024. The World Health Organization’s guideline is five. Everyone in this city breathes that difference every day, and the work of establishing what is in the air, where it came from and what it does to the people in it has to be done by someone standing in it.
I designed and built the laboratory’s website, and assembled the record that sits inside it.
Presence of the Lab
More than two decades is the part that cannot be rebuilt. Air quality is a question you can only answer by having been there: nobody can go back and measure Dhaka’s air in 2005. The laboratory has been at it since 2003, and that unbroken record is the most valuable thing it owns.
The scale of it is a hundred and thirty-one peer-reviewed papers, twenty-nine instruments, twenty-two externally funded projects, and two measuring stations. One sits on Bhola island out in the Meghna estuary, where air off the Bay of Bengal arrives before the city has touched it. The other is a rooftop in Dhaka, high enough to catch the city rather than one road’s traffic, because a pollution figure from Dhaka means nothing until you know what the air looked like before it got here.
And forty-three theses. That is forty-three people taught to measure something properly and to defend the number afterwards. In a country that needs its own environmental evidence rather than someone else’s estimate of it, that may be the longest-lasting thing the laboratory produces.
A Global Profile of the Lab
Air does not stop at a border. What arrives over the Bay of Bengal has crossed several countries first, which is why most of the laboratory’s work is done with institutions elsewhere, and why its results matter beyond Bangladesh.
Its current projects are funded by the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, the University Grants Commission of Bangladesh, the Bangladesh Climate Change Trust under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, and the Bose Centre for Advanced Study and Research in Natural Sciences. Twenty-two externally funded projects have run through the laboratory, and a hundred and thirty-one peer-reviewed papers have come out of it since 2003.
That is a Bangladeshi laboratory working as a peer of the institutions it collaborates with, not as a junior partner supplying samples. It is worth being able to see that at a glance.
Crafted for Science
A laboratory can do twenty years of serious work and still be invisible. Its output ends up scattered: a paper in one journal, a thesis on a shelf, a project report filed with a ministry, an instrument nobody outside the building knows exists. Anyone wanting to know what the laboratory has actually done has to already know someone who can tell them.
That is what the site was built to end. A policy maker looking for evidence on air quality in Dhaka, a funding body assessing a proposal, a journalist checking a number, a student deciding where to apply, a research group abroad looking for a partner in South Asia. All of them can now see the whole record, and see how the parts connect to each other.
The hard part was never the website. It was the merge. Twenty years of a laboratory’s life is held in more places than anyone realises, and in no consistent form: people arrive as students and leave as staff, projects overlap and end quietly, the same name is written three different ways across three author lists. Assembling that into one honest record meant going through it piece by piece and deciding what belonged to whom, and admitting, where the documents could not settle it, that it was not yet known.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A few records still sit unclassified on the site rather than being filed somewhere convenient, because forcing them would have made the archive tidier and less true. A laboratory’s public record should be something it can stand behind.
What exists now is a laboratory at the University of Dhaka that can be read from anywhere in the world: a hundred and thirty-one publications, forty-three theses, twenty-nine instruments, thirty-seven people, and the connections between them. The science was always there. It is simply no longer taking anyone’s word for it.
Related
- Visit the laboratory’s site, designed and built by me
- My own atmospheric chemistry work
- Back to all research