Professor Thornton earned her B.S.E. from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She started as a faculty member in MIT’s ME department where she focused on product development, manufacturing, and quality systems. As a senior partner in Analytics Operations Engineering, she worked with over 40 large companies to implement, streamline, and improve their product development, manufacturing and quality systems. As the Director of Engineering and Quality at Dragon Innovation she helped over 30 new hardware startups to transform prototypes into products. Now as a Professor of the Practice at BU she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in product development, manufacturing, additive manufacturing and product realization. Dr. Thornton is the author of many articles, blogs and two books and is a frequent speaker in multiple university programs and industry forums. Her book Product Realization: going from one to a million, is being published by Wiley press in early 2021.