Michel Bakhoum

Egyptian engineer, professor, and researcher

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

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, to strengthen his background in Theoretical Mechanics, Theory of Elasticity and Theory of Plasticity. He worked also (part time) in a Consulting Engineering Firm at the same time in New York City, to get acquainted with State of the Art design methodologies of Concrete Structures in the USA.

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.