Mr. Tompkins joined the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) as an affiliate Systems Engineer in January 2018 at the Applied Systems Lab (ASL) in Huntsville, AL. Prior to joining GTRI he worked in several technical, engineering, and leadership roles at the Aviation Missile Research Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC) Software Engineering Directorate (SED) as a US Department of Defense civilian employee from July 2005 until January 2018. Mr. Tompkins earned a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Tennessee Knoxville in May 2005 and later received a Master of Science in Software Engineering in December 2007 from the University of Alabama in Huntsville where he later completed further post-graduate course work in Systems Engineering and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). Mr. Tompkins currently serves as the Chief Engineer for the Architecture and System Development Division.
Mr. Tompkins serves as the technical project lead and principal investigator for the Aviation Radio Control Manager (ARCM) software development project. ARCM integrates tactical radio equipment into multiple, dissimilar aircraft platforms using a modular open system approach (MOSA) and the ARINC 661 open graphics standard to provide the pilot vehicle interface for control, status, and configuration of installed voice and data radio channels.
Mr. Tompkins is a credited contributing author of the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical Standard [ISBN 1-937218-52-2] starting with Edition 1.0 through Edition 3.1 and has multiple published conference papers and journal proceedings.
Areas of research interest include software safety, reliability, airworthiness, interoperability, portability/reuse, MBSE, and modular open systems approaches (MOSA) for software intensive embedded avionics.