User:Marklsanders/sandbox

Prof Thomas Mutrie (Tom) HUSBAND, PhD , FREng

Tom Husband was the Vice Chancellor of the University of Salford from 1990 to 1997.

He was born in Glasgow on July 7, 1936 and educated at Shawlands Academy. He went straight from school to a 5 year trade apprenticeship as a marine engine fitter at the Weir Group in Cathcart, Glasgow. On completion and with a Higher National Certificate he was sponsored by Weir to take a sandwich-structured BSc degree in Mechanical Engineering at Strathclyde University. He worked as a Manager and Project Engineer at Weir having graduated in 1961. He left Glasgow to join the multi national Swedish engineering Group ASEA (now ABB) and worked with them in Denmark, Sweden and South Africa. In 1965 he came back to take an MA degree at Strathclyde in Management, then won a UK Government Fellowship to study Management on a one year tenure at the University of Chicago. From there he moved to a Lectureship at Strathclyde in Engineering Management (1967 to 1970) where he also graduated with a PhD degree, then to be Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of Production Management at the University of Glasgow (1970 to 1973). In 1973 he was appointed Professor of Manufacturing Organisation at Loughborough University. He was next appointed, in 1981, to be Professor of Engineering Manufacture at Imperial College London. He became Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial from 1983 to 1990. He also established the Centre for Robotics and Automated Systems at Imperial and was its Director from 1982 to 1990. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1987. He moved to Salford University in 1990.

During his tenure at Salford he was a Director at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, a Council Member of the Engineering Council, a member of the Manchester Steering Group for the Commonwealth Games and a Trustee of the Granada Foundation .He was awarded a DSc (Hon) degree by the University of Manchester in 1990.

After his retirement from Salford he took on a range of roles including Chairman of the East and North Herts NHS Hospital Trust, Chairman of UKERNA, Expert Adviser to the Swedish Government on their NUTEK Programme and membership of the Governing Body of Bournemouth University.