Anna C. Thornton

Professor Thornton earned her B.S.E. from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She started her career as a faculty member in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering department. During her time at MIT, her research focused on product development, manufacturing, and quality systems. After leaving MIT, she was a senior partner in Analytics Operations Engineering. At Analytics 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 prototype designs into final products. Prof. Thornton is now a Professor of the Practice in the Mechanical Engineering Department at BU where 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 program and industry forums. Her book Product Realization: going from one to a million, is being published by Wiley press in early 2021.

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