Most EWUians know Prof. Dr. Shams Rahman as the Vice Chancellor. Fewer know that before he led a university, he spent decades as a researcher, and the world has noticed.
First, what the list is. The Stanford/Elsevier “top 2%” list is not an award from Stanford University. It is a database compiled by Stanford’s Prof. John Ioannidis and colleagues, using Elsevier’s Scopus data. It ranks researchers by a citation-based score that accounts for citations, co-authorship and author position. A researcher gets in by being in the top 100,000 overall or the top 2% of their sub-field, across 22 fields and 174 sub-fields. For scale, the 2022 update assessed more than 9.7 million scientists, and 195,605 made the top 2%.
Prof. Rahman was named in the list in 2021 and 2022, as reported by The Daily Star, The Business Standard and Prothom Alo when he was appointed EWU’s sixth Vice Chancellor in October 2023. EWU’s VC Newsletter (July to September 2025) says he was named again in the 2025 edition.
Behind those listings is a long research career in supply chain management. He joined EWU from RMIT University in Melbourne, where he was a Professor of Supply Chain Management, after earlier posts at the University of Sydney and the University of Wollongong. His PhD is from the University of Exeter in the UK, earned on a Commonwealth Scholarship. He has published 250+ research papers, supervised 25 PhD candidates, serves as Associate Editor of the International Journal of Information Systems and Supply Chain Management, and sits on the editorial boards of 15 international journals.
He is not the only name from EWU. According to the same newsletter, Dr. Zubair Hasan and Dr. Nazmul Abedin Khan of the Department of Mathematical and Physical Sciences have also been recognized in the list.
So the next time you see the Vice Chancellor’s name on a notice, remember there is a research record behind it that the world pays attention to.
