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Professor Gregory Thompson joined the Department of Metallurgical & Materials Engineering at The University of Alabama as an Assistant Professor in 2003. He was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2008 and promoted to Professor in 2012. In 2018, he was appointed Distinguished Research Professor for the UA system. He served for more than a decade as the Director for the Interdisciplinary Materials Science PhD program housed in the UA Graduate School, where he quadrupled the enrollment to over forty students during his administrative tenure. 

He is now the founding Executive Director for the Alabama Materials Institute (2023), one of four university-wide strategic research investment areas, with nearly 90 affiliated faculty across twelve different departments. The institute has eleven full-time staff members and maintains user facilities in analytical instrumentation as well as powder processing and additive manufacturing in support of materials characterization and fabrication research. 

Professor Thompson has published nearly 300 peer-reviewed articles in his research areas of analytical microscopy and phase transformations and has graduated 16 M.S. and 29 Ph.D. students to date. He received his Ph.D. (2003) and M.S. (1998) in Materials Science & Engineering from The Ohio State University, and a B.S. (1996) in Physics from Brigham Young University. Between his M.S. and Ph.D., he worked as a processing coating engineer. 

He was awarded UA’s Blackmon-Moody Outstanding Professor of the Year in 2014, the TMS Brimacombe medalist in 2017, and became a Fellow of the International Field Emission Society (atom probe tomography) in 2025.