Michel Bakhoum

Michel Bakhoum was born in June 1913 in Cairo.

He graduated from the Civil Engineering Department at Cairo University in 1936 (then known as Fouad I University). He completed his M.Sc. in 1942, and his first Ph.D. in 1945. He was the second person in Egypt to receive a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University. In 1945, he traveled to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received his second Ph.D. He then spent one year at Columbia University in New York.

In 1949, Michel Bakhoum returned to Egypt where he started teaching in the Structural Engineering Department at Cairo University as an assistant professor. He started a consulting firm in 1950 with his colleague Ahmed Moharram. The company is now known as ACE: Arab Consulting Engineers (Moharram-Bakhoum). The company started as a structural-design office with four people in 1950, now the company has over eight-hundred staff working with the consulting firm ACE.

Michel Bakhoum taught civil and structural engineering students for about forty years, mainly at Cairo University, but also at Ain Shams and Assiut Universities. He was a teaching assistant from 1937 to 1945, and then as assistant professor and professor from 1949 to 1981.

Michel Bakhoum was a fellow and member in several technical societies — Fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers (UK), and representative in Egypt from 1972 to 1979; Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers; Member of the American Concrete Institute; and Member of the International Association for Bridges and Structural Engineering and various other engineering and academic bodies.

Michel Bakhoum died on 21 April 1981. The next day, the daily Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published a front-page news article about him, citing that he died, and summarized his main works. A street in the Dokki District (in Giza, Greater Cairo) where he lived was named after him, Dr. Michel Bakhoum Street. T

• List of prominent Copts
• Michel Bakhoum: Pioneer of the Built Infrastructure of Africa’s Most Populous Nation, By Seif El Rashidi, Great Achievements, Structure Magazine, Apr, 2014, http://www.structuremag.org/wp-content/uploads/D-GreatAch-Rashidi-Apr141.pdf