Tributes have been paid to former Master of Corpus Christi College Professor Haroon Ahmed, who has died aged 88.
Tributes have been paid to former Master of Corpus Christi College Professor Haroon Ahmed, who has died aged 88.
Professor Ahmed, the first British-Pakistani Head of House, had a distinguished academic career centred on research interests in the physics and technology of nanoscale electronic devices, nanotechnology and electron beam lithography. Master of Corpus Christi College from 2000 to 2006, he remained actively involved as a Life Fellow and later an Honorary Fellow.
Born in Calcutta in 1936, after the partition of India Professor Ahmed and his family were forced to flee to Karachi in the newly formed Pakistan. The family later moved to London where Professor Ahmed read Electrical Engineering at Imperial College, graduating with a First Class degree. After a brief spell working for General Electric Company in Birmingham, he realised his passion was for research. Encouraged by a friend, he successfully applied for a PhD scholarship at King’s College Cambridge. After a formative sabbatical year in New York state where he worked at the Thomas J Watson Research Centre of IBM, he returned to Cambridge where his research activity grew rapidly. He moved to the Cavendish Laboratory where he joined the Department of Engineering and established the Microelectronics Research Centre, sponsored by Hitachi. In 1990, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, in 1992 he was promoted to Professor of Microelectronics, and in 1996 he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Cambridge.
Professor Ahmed died peacefully at home, surrounded by his wife and family on 23 October 2024. He is survived by his wife, Anne; his children, Ayesha, Rehana and Imran; his grandchildren, Max, Jem, Keir and Maya; and his sister, Zubaida.
Read his full obituary on the Corpus Christi website and on the Department of Physics website.
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