Brandon Thorne is the director of the Office of the Vice President for PPPL at Princeton University. His most recent position was the director of business development for Merrick & Company in the nuclear services and technology business unit. In that role, he was responsible for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Supply Chain Management Center's agreements portfolio and the subject matter expert for all DOE national laboratories. Before this position, he served as the chief operating officer of the Physics Department and Superconducting Magnet Division and deputy directorate chief operating officer of the Nuclear and Particle Physics Directorate at Brookhaven National Laboratory. There, he led the operations, execution, strategy and planning to include the oversight at the European Council for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, in Switzerland and RIKEN in Japan.   

He is an executive certificate holder in public leadership and public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He also is a senior executive fellow and senior executive in national and international security at the Kennedy School. He has a strong executive business background completing top programs at Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University. He is certified in diversity and inclusion, a certified project director and a change management adviser. He earned his doctoral degree from the the Nelson Mandela College of Government & Social Sciences at Southern University and A&M College, a historically Black college and university (HBCU) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.