Wazed Miah was born on 16 February 1942 in the village of Fatehpur (Miah Bari) at Pirganj, Rangpur District to Abdul Quader Miah and Moyzunessa (Maijun Nesa Bibi).[1] He was the youngest among three sisters and four brothers. His uncle was Wazed Miah. He was then called 'Sudha Miah'.

He passed the matriculation examination at Rangpur Zilla School in 1956, and earned his Intermediate Certificate at Rajshahi College in 1958. He followed in the footsteps of his eldest sister's son, physicist Abdul Qayyum Sarker, and took admission into the Department of Physics, University of Dhaka. In 1961 he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in physics and in 1962 he finished his Master of Science. He completed the Diploma of Imperial College London Course in 1963-64. In 1967 he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics from Durham University, England. His thesis was on the bootstrap hypothesis in theoretical particle physics, and he worked under Professor E. J. Squires.

From 1961 to 1962 he was the vice-president of the Fazlul Huq Muslim Hall unit of the East Pakistan Muslim Chhatra League (now known as the Bangladesh Chhatra League) at the University of Dhaka. He was arrested for taking part in the 1962 East Pakistan Education movement against Ayub's education commission. After university he did not remain involved in politics.

On 1 April 1963, Miah found employment with the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), initially attached to the Atomic Energy Research Center (AERC) in Karachi. In 1969, Miah got an associateship at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy. In the same year, he returned home to Pakistan and continued with the AERC. In Karachi, Miah was the chief scientist at the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant but had his security clearance revoked, that led to termination of his contract and his migration to Bangladesh.citation needed

His wife, Sheikh Hasina, was with him in West Germany, where he was receiving advanced training in nuclear reactor physics, when her father, Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was assassinated in 1975 along with most of his family. Wazed was engaged in research. work at the New Delhi-based laboratory of the Atomic Energy Commission of India during 1975–1982, the period of exile of the remainder of the Mujib family after the bloody 15 August 1975 Bangladesh coup d'état. After his return to Bangladesh, he joined the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission, and retired as its chairman in 1999.

Miah married Sheikh Hasina, eldest daughter of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 17 November 1967. They have a son Sajeeb Wazed Joy and a daughter Saima Wazed Putul.

Miah died on 9 May 2009. He had for long suffered from high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney failure, diabetes, and asthma. He had a bypass operation a few years earlier and an angioplasty in Singapore only a few months before his death. He was buried at a family graveyard in his native village at Pirganj, Rangpur.

One of the main science buildings of University of Rajshahi, previously named as 4th Science Building, has recently been renamed after him as Dr. M Wazed Miah Academic Building. The Information and Communications Technology building of Shahjalal University of Science and Technology is named after him. An academic building is also constructed in his memory in Hajee Mohammad Danesh Science and Technology University