Professional Achievement in Industry

Anthony L. Thornton, Ph.D.
Senior Manager of Strategy Deployment
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company

By Garland L. Thompson

Anthony L. Thornton is two kinds of innovator. As a Ph.D. aeronautical engineer, he works at the threshold of knowledge about how airframes, flight-control surfaces, and irregularly shaped objects respond to the dynamics of hypersonic flight. Hard science. 

A specialist in computational fluid dynamics, the development and use of supercomputer tools to model the conditions under which complex shapes move through the atmosphere, he's probing the frontiers of possibility in powered flight. He's looked into everything from how materials ablate from the skin of a reentry vehicle to inventing new ways to investigate airflow around parachute surfaces. Hard science all the way.

But Dr. Thornton also is a master teamworker who understands the blending of aptitudes, skills, and ideas necessary to accomplish complex tasks. Soft science, even if the work is exactingly hard. 

Materials supporting Dr. Thornton's nomination say he "horrified" colleagues at Sandia National Laboratories by taking an assignment in -- gasp -- human resources. The big promotions in technology-driven enterprises come from driving high-profile, profit-generating projects, not scoping out new ways to recruit and manage teams, the conventional wisdom said.

The best team leaders have to understand what makes a team work, however. Dr. Thornton, an award-winning exponent of the task-oriented, product-producing environment, brought his field experience to the task of broadening Sandia's work force, coming up with a new set of innovations. Within a year, he became the first Black director in Sandia Labs' 40-year history and attracted the notice of Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary and enough industry recognition that other firms benchmarked his programs for their own use.

Then back he went to the hard-science world, joining Lockheed Martin's famed Skunk Works. He worked a partnership with California State University at Northridge to lease a supercomputer and spread the gospel of computational fluid dynamics as a problem-solver throughout the organization. He and his partnership won the Engineering Industrial Council's Distinguished Engineering Award 2000.

Dr. Thornton now leads the integration of efforts from disparate engineering organizations to maximize the results from the synergy of Lockheed Martin's broad range of capabilities. A top fusileer, he has grown into a man reporting to the top echelons, helping to decide the overall strategic direction. Once one of America's most promising young men, he is spreading his wings at the top in aerospace, with higher pinnacles in sight.

Garland L. Thompson is assistant managing editor of The Philadelphia Tribune and a member of the Black Engineer of the Year Awards Selection Panel. He can be reached at GThompson@ccgmag.com.