Seraj studied at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh obtaining a B.Sc. in 1980. She completed her M.Sc. from the same university in 1982. She obtained her PhD in biochemistry from University of Glasgow in 1986 and went to University of Liverpool for post-doctoral work in the following year. After completing her post-doc., she joined the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Dhaka in 1988. She became an associate professor in 1991 and later a professor in 1997 at the same university. She has been supervising plant biotechnology projects funded by foreign and local grants as a principal investigator since 1991. She is a visiting researcher with UT Austin since 2013