Michel Bakhoum

Michel Bakhoum (1913–1981; Arabic: ميشيل باخوم‎‎, Mīšīl Bāḫūm) was an Egyptian consulting civil engineer, university professor, and a researcher in concrete structures.

Michel Bakhoum was born in June 1913 in Cairo. His parents moved to Cairo five years beforehand from a small village near the town of Tahta in Northern Egypt. He received several awards; the first was in 1931 (Prince Omar Tosson Award) as he was the first of his class in the High School diploma competition, which included all the High School diploma students in Egypt.

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. He did not feel that this was sufficient in terms of education and wanted to learn more. At that time, the Second World War had ended allowing for the possibility of studying in the United States. In 1945, he traveled to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he got his second Ph.D. Wishing to strengthen his background in mathematics, theoretical mechanics and elasticity theory, he spent one year at Columbia University in New York. He was working at the same time in a consulting firm in New York, to get practical experience.

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. The consulting firm has designed several buildings, bridges, shells, grain silos, cement factories, airports, industrial plants, and other structures in Egypt and in the Middle East. The firm contributed immensely to the introduction of prestressed concrete structures in Egypt.

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