MSU’s Thompson Elected Fellow of National Aeronautics Institute
November 1, 2004
STARKVILLE, Miss.–Longtime Mississippi State aerospace engineering professor Joe F. Thompson is a newly elected Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
A William L. Giles Distinguished Professor in Aerospace Engineering, the Grenada native and university alumnus will be inducted formally during the AIAA’s annual Fellows Dinner and awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., next May.
“AIAA Fellows are persons of distinction who have made notable and valuable contributions to the arts, sciences or technology of aeronautics or astronautics,” AIAA executive director Cort Durocher said in a recent letter notifying Thompson of the honor bestowed by professional colleagues.
For nearly 75 years, the AIAA has been the principal voice and technical society devoted to continuing contributions and global leadership in the aerospace community.
“Joe Thompson being elected a Fellow of AIAA is well deserved and echoes his long list of contributions in research, teaching and service,” said MSU aerospace department head Tony Vizzini.
An authority on numerical grid generation and computational fluid dynamics, Thompson was founding director of what originally was named the Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation at MSU.
“The AIAA Fellow award is recognition of Joe Thompson’s international reputation and pioneering work in grid generation for computational fluid dynamics,” added W. Glenn Steele, interim dean of MSU’s Bagley College of Engineering.
Thompson is an aerospace engineering graduate of the college, having received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1961 and 1963, respectively.
He currently directs the ERC-based Center for Department of Defense Programming Environment and Training, which is a part of DoD’s Computing Modernization Program. In that capacity, he heads an eight-year, $108 million effort involving a dozen universities and five private companies.
A 1971 doctoral graduate in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Thompson in 1985 led two colleagues in authoring the first definitive text on numerical grid generation.
He was appointed by President Clinton in 1997 to the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, continuing this service under President Bush through 2001.