Haroon Ahmed

Haroon Ahmed was a British-Pakistani scientist who specialised in microelectronics and electrical engineering. Born in Calcutta, then part of British India, in 1936, he moved with his family to England in 1954, studied at Imperial College London and took his doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 1963. He joined the Cambridge Engineering Department that year, later moved to the Physics Department as Professor of Microelectronics, and headed the Microelectronics Research Centre until he retired in 2003. His research covered micro and nanofabrication, electron and ion beam lithography and semiconductor single electron devices, and he helped bring industry and the university together, including the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory. He wrote Electronics for Engineers with P. J. Spreadbury and An Introduction to Physical Electronics with A. H. W. Beck, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1990. He served as Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, from 2000 to 2006, and died in Cambridge on 23 October 2024.