Dr Saiful Karim is a Professor in the School of Law and Justice at the University of Southern Queensland. He was the McDougall Visiting Professor in International Law at West Virginia University, where he taught a course on international climate change law and delivered the Annual McDougall Lecture. He also taught a postgraduate course on Asia–Pacific environmental law as a visiting faculty member at Sydney University. He was a consultant at the University of the South Pacific where he taught courses on marine law and comparative environmental law. He was a visiting research fellow at the National University of Singapore, and he practised at a Singapore law firm. He was a lawyer in the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association.

Dr Karim teaches and researches in various areas of human rights, ocean and environmental law. He has published extensively in the fields of ocean and environmental law and has presented research papers at several conferences and workshops in Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania. He is the author of Prevention of Pollution of the Marine Environment from Vessels: The Potential and Limits of the International Maritime Organisation (Springer, 2015), Maritime Terrorism and the Role of Judicial Institutions in the International Legal Order (Brill-Nijhoff, 2017) and Shipbreaking in Developing Countries: A Requiem for Environmental Justice from the Perspective of Bangladesh (Routledge, 2018).

The Australian Government nominated Dr Karim in several important global expert bodies. He is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC). He is also a lead author of the first Global Assessment and the first Asia Pacific Regional Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). He was an advisor to the Australian government delegation in various meetings of the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC). He received the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law 2018 Scholarship Award for his outstanding contribution to interdisciplinary research of environmental law. He has travelled to North and South America, Oceania, Europe, Asia and Africa for research, academic and professional activities.