Professor at Civil Engineering at Univiersiti Malaysia Sarawak,UNIMAS.
Mannan obtained BSc in Civil Engineering with First class in 1986, MSc in 1994 and PhD in 2001.
He started his career as lecturer at Bangladesh Institute of Technology, Rajshahi (now RUET) in 1986.
He served as design engineer in consulting firm in KL from 1994 to 1998 to design several structural and infrastructural projects including 25-storey Tower at A’Famosa Golf Resort, Melaka and RM60M infra project at BIMP, Pahang.
He served as academician at Universiti Malaysia Sabah, UMS for 13 years (1999 to 2012). Now, he is at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, UNIMAS since May 2012.
During his service at UMS, he along his colleagues has contributed to develop undergraduate course structures for 4 years and laboratory with sophisticated, modern and essential equipment.
The laboratory is equipped with modern testing facilities such as 0.5 Ton capacity Shake Table, Horizontal testing machine, 500kN capacity Servo pulser, 1,000kN capacity Actuator, a strong floor of 15mX15m area, 5,000KN capacity Compression testing machine, 50m/sec wind blowing capacity Wind Tunnel etc.
with computerised data acquisition system for testing and research in structural lab. He has also served for acquiring large no. of civil engineering books in UMS library.
He along his colleagues at UMS is aware of OBE (outcome based education) since 2005 to meet Engineering Accreditation Council in Malaysia and also Malaysian Quality Assessment.
He has also devised some testing facilities through PhD research which are contributing in research and consultancy.
He has obtained International grant from British Council, Malaysia to conduct joint research with University of Leeds, UK.
He has also obtained grants from national, local and private sectors. He has attracted students from Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and local.
The research assistantships have been provided them to pursue in PhD and MSc studies under his supervision. He has also five patents (national and international) and has two commercialized products namely SIConSofa and C-channel as IBS products for the construction industry.
Since joining at UNIMAS his main focus is to develop commercially viable research products for the construction industry contributing to the sustainable green infrastructure.
Now he is team leader of one ERGS grant project to develop ‘Honeycomb precast pavement’ to capture flash flood as cost effective to meet sustainable green infrastructure.
His research focus is also to develop structural lightweight aggregate using solid wastes. He is also working on non-funded project to develop guidelines on ‘Durability-based Concrete Performance using Local Ready-mixed Concrete’.
He has more than 100 publications and obtained h-index of 12, i10-index of 13 with citations of 579.
Based on 27 years experience in teaching, consulting and research, his vision is to bring the department into international platform as excellence in research on Innovative Construction Materials and Structure.