New Visiting Professor

Visiting Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering

Professor Marcus Lee was appointed Professor in Civil Engineering and Construction at Curtin University Sarawak in 2012, after 35 years in industry, teaching and research in the United Kingdom.  After graduating with a First Class Honours degree in Civil Engineering at Birmingham University, United Kingdom in 1977, Professor Lee worked in construction, consulting and local government, gaining a variety of practical experiences in Structural Engineering, and qualified as a Chartered Engineer in 1982. In 1987, he was awarded a PhD degree, again from Birmingham University for his research in the strength of steel structures with perforated webs. After finishing his PhD, and having spent a short period with a nuclear processing company in their structural design department, Professor Lee was appointed Lecturer at the University of Wales Swansea, UK in 1987. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1997, then Reader in 1999. In March 2000, He was appointed Chair Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. In 2010, he retired from his full-time position, but continues his work in a part-time capacity at Southampton.

Whilst lecturing at the University of Wales Swansea, Professor Lee’s research interests were in the strength, fatigue and fracture of welded steel structures. He conducted and supervised extensive investigations into the ultimate strength of tubular joints of various configurations with applications in offshore jacket structures. In the area of fatigue, he has developed parametric equations for stress concentration distributions in tubular joints. For fracture, estimations of stress intensity factors for cracks in tubular joints, as well as estimations of the J-integral in butt-weld cracks were the main contributions. Professor Lee’s research has received extensive funding from international oil companies, government research establishments and funding councils. The extensive publication of his research results has received wide international recognition, and Professor Lee was awarded the high doctorate degree of Doctor of Engineering by the University of Birmingham in 2001. The title of the DEng thesis is ‘Strength, Fatigue and Fracture of Welded Steel Structures’. At Southampton, Professor Lee diversified his interests into the use of advanced fibre composites for upgrading and rehabilitation of metallic structures. This has significant applications in the onshore civil engineering structures in Britain, as upgrading and strengthening is much in demand. His main research focus has been on the mechanical and temperature fatigue failure of the adhesive bonding between the fibre composite and the steel substrate. Some of the research results have been included in design guides for practice.