Profile

Thomas H. Sanders, Jr.

Regents' Professor

Bio

Dr. Sanders joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1986 after serving 5 years as a Materials Science and Engineering faculty member at Purdue University. He has worked as a Research Scientist at Alcoa Technical Center (1974-78) and the Mechanical Properties Research Laboratory at Georgia Tech (1979-1980). Dr. Sanders has been actively engaged in various aspects of the physical metallurgy of aluminum alloys, focusing primarily on precipitation hardening aluminum alloys. He and his graduate students have worked in the areas of phase transformations, corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, fatigue and fatigue crack growth, fracture toughness, computer modeling of the development of microstructure during aging in Al-Li alloys, and the kinetics of recrystallization. Dr. Sanders is a member of TMS and ASM and is and ASM Fellow; Program evaluator for TMS (ABET); and has organized or co-organized ten international conferences on aluminum alloys. He has published more than 100 journal and conference articles. He was awarded a Research Fulbright Fellowship to work at ONERA in Paris France in 1992. In 1994, he received the W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award. While teaching a variety of graduate and advanced undergraduate classes at Georgia Tech, Dr. Sanders has always enjoyed teaching his Introduction to Materials Science course. His classes have laid the foundation in materials science for well over 1000 Georgia Tech engineers, and he continues to evolve the course as the classroom moves from academic buildings in Atlanta to homes, offices, and schools across the world through the Coursera platform.