Mahmoud Moussa Shabandar is recorded as an Iraqi student enrolled on the 1962-63 postgraduate course run by the Architectural Association’s (AA) Department of Tropical Studies, in London. He completed the course in 1963 and graduated with a postgraduate Certificate. One of his student projects (designed jointly with fellow classmates), was for a school in Baghdad, and was published in the AA Journal of April 1963. Little is known to us of his subsequent career but between 1974 and 1979 he was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and, five years later, appears to have been studying at the University of Sussex, UK, within the Institute of Development Studies, describing himself as "an architect, an urban and regional planner, and a development planning consultant… currently conducting research on issues relating to technology transfer in the Middle East.”

 Sources

• Architectural Association Council Minutes, 13th February, 1963. AA Archives
• Architectural Association Membership Register, 1974. Architectural Association, 1974
• Architectural Association Membership List, 1979. Architectural Association, 1979
• Architectural Association Journal, April 1963, pp.302-309
• The Arab Gulf Journal, MD Research Services, 1984