Thomas H. Sanders, Jr.

Dr. Thomas H. Sanders, Jr. has been a prominent member of the Georgia Tech faculty since 1986, following a five-year tenure in Materials Science and Engineering at Purdue University. His career includes roles as a Research Scientist at Alcoa Technical Center from 1974 to 1978 and at Georgia Tech's Mechanical Properties Research Laboratory from 1979 to 1980. Dr. Sanders specializes in the physical metallurgy of aluminum alloys, particularly in precipitation hardening. Alongside his graduate students, he has explored various topics such as phase transformations, corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, fatigue, fracture toughness, and the computer modeling of microstructure development in Al-Li alloys. He is an active member of TMS and ASM, an ASM Fellow, and has served as a program evaluator for TMS (ABET). Dr. Sanders has organized ten international conferences on aluminum alloys and has authored over 100 journal and conference articles. In 1992, he was awarded a Research Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research at ONERA in Paris, France. He received the W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award in 1994 and has taught numerous graduate and advanced undergraduate courses at Georgia Tech, particularly enjoying his Introduction to Materials Science course, which has educated over 1000 engineers. He continues to adapt this course for online learning through the Coursera platform, reaching students globally.