UA Professor Earns NSF Career Award

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Dr. Gregory B. Thompson, assistant professor of metallurgical and materials engineering, has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. CAREER Awards are NSF’s most prestigious recognition of top-performing young scientists and engineers who are beginning their careers.

Thompson has been awarded a five-year, $500,000 grant to advance his study in microstructure and mean stress evolution in thin films. Specifically, the award supports Thompson’s fundamental research activities in understanding how metal alloys transform between different crystal structures. This research will quantify how stress and alloy morphology contribute to the atomic order stability in very thin films for magnetic information storage.

In 2005, Thompson received The Metals, Minerals, and Materials Society Young Leader Internship award. Additionally, he has published more than 30 peer-reviewed journal and conference proceeding articles.

The CAREER award is courtesy of NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program. NSF established the CAREER program in 1995 to help top performers, early in their careers, develop simultaneously their contributions and commitment to research and to education. According to the NSF Web site, the CAREER program supports the activities of those teacher-scholars who are “most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.” CAREER award recipients are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution.

In 1837, The University of Alabama became the first university in the state to offer engineering classes and was one of the first five in the nation to do so. Today, the College of Engineering has about 1,800 students and more than 95 faculty. It has been fully accredited since accreditation standards were implemented in the 1930s.