James Milton Ham

Who was James Milton Ham?

James Milton Ham, OC OOnt was a Canadian engineer, university administrator and the tenth President of the University of Toronto.

Born in Coboconk, Ontario, Ham attended Runnymede Collegiate Institute and received a B.A.Sc. degree from the University of Toronto in 1943. He then joined the Royal Canadian Navy as an electrical officer. After the Second World War, he was a lecturer and housemaster in the Ajax division of the University of Toronto. In 1946, he left to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received an S.M. degree in 1947 and an Sc.D. degree in 1952. He was a Research Associate from 1949 to 1951 and was Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering from 1951 to 1952.

In 1953, he returned to the University of Toronto as Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, becoming Professor in 1959. He headed the Department of Electrical Engineering in 1964, before becoming the Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering in 1966 and the Dean of Graduate Studies in 1976. He served as President of the University of Toronto from 1978 to 1983. He was appointed President Emeritus in 1988.

Ham was a Canadian pioneer in the teaching and promotion of research in the field of automatic control. He supervised the first doctoral students in that field at a Canadian university. He initiated the Associate Committee on Automatic Control of the National Research Council of Canada and chaired that Committee from 1959 to 1964. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Automatic Control from 1966 to 1972.