ICAMISS

Dr. Joe F. Thompson is William L. Giles Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Mississippi State University. He was the founding director of the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Computational Field Simulation at MSU. He received his PhD in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1971. He has published numerous journal articles and conference presentations in the area of numerical grid generation and has been a consultant in this area for the aerospace, automotive, petroleum, nuclear, and civil engineering industries. In 1985, he led two colleagues in authoring the first definitive text on numerical grid generation, Numerical Grid Generation: Foundations and Applications, which has now been translated into Japanese. He was editor for the section on Computational Science for the Handbook of Computer Science and Engineering and was the lead editor for the Handbook of Grid Generation published in 1999. Thompson has served on the editorial board for the Journal of Computational Physics, as an associate editor for Numerical Heat Transfer, and as a Senior Associate Editor for Applied Mathematics and Computation. He was the 1992 recipient of the Aerodynamics Award of the AIAA with the citation "for meritorious achievement in the field of applied aerodynamics recognizing notable contributions in numerical grid generation which have revolutionized computational aerodynamics for realistic configurations and complex flowfields". In 2004 he was named a Fellow of the AIAA. In 2008 he was named to the Georgia Tech Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni. He was appointed by President Clinton in 1997 to the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), continuing this service under President Bush through 2001. With the transition of PITAC to PCAST, he now serves as a member of the Networking and Information Technology Technical Advisory Group of PCAST. In 1995 he led the formation of the multi-university team that teamed with Nichols Research (later acquired by Computer Sciences Corp.) and Raytheon/E-Systems to win the support contracts for Programming Environment & Training (PET) at three of the four DoD Major Shared Resource Centers (MSRCs) as part of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, and he directed this team for the MSRC at the Army Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, MS. In 2001 he led the MOS university/industry team, with MSU as the prime contractor, in winning the new PET competition. He now directs this eight-year $108M effort, involving twelve universities and five companies, as Director of the DoD Programming Environment & Training (PET) Center in the High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HPC2) at MSU.