[3] Alam was one of eleven siblings: his eldest brother, Muhammad Mahmood Alam (1935 – 2013), was a Pakistani fighter pilot and war hero who rose to the rank of one-star general in the Pakistan Air Force;[3] another brother of his, M. Shahid Alam, is an economist and a professor at Northeastern University,[4][5] Alam decided to become a physicist when his eighth grade science teacher at Saint Gregory High School in Dacca introduced him to atomic and nuclear physics: "I was hooked; I came home and told my father I know that I would become a physicist," he wrote.
[6] He was the first member of his family to come to the United States, and was one of the first Pakistanis to get a PhD in experimental particle physics.
Alam afterwards spent a year at Vanderbilt University as a research associate before securing a position at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Alam remained with Vanderbilt until 1984, at which time he joined the faculty of the University at Albany, SUNY.
Alam was also the chair professor of physics at the King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals.