A CIRANO Associate Researcher and Fellow since 2009, Daniel Thornton is Emeritus Professor at the Smith School of Business at Queen's University.

Holding a Ph.D. in Financial Economics from York University, his research interests are accounting, economics, finance, investment and management.

In 2017, he completed a twelve-year appointment as the Chartered Accountants of Ontario Professor at Queen's University. He is currently one of five members of the Minister of National Revenue's Offshore Compliance Advisory Committee and recently completed a nine-year stint as a voting member of the Accounting Standards Oversight Council. He has served as a full-time Professional Accounting Fellow at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, DC, an editor of The Accounting Review (the journal of the American Accounting Association), an editor of Contemporary Accounting Research (the journal of the Canadian Academic Accounting Association), and a voting member of the Canadian Accounting Standards Board.

For his research and educational contributions to the accounting discipline, he has received both the Distinguished Contribution to Accounting Thought Award and the Outstanding Educator Award from the Canadian Academic Accounting Association.

A Fellow of the Institutes of Chartered Accountants of both Ontario and Alberta, he has provided extensive expert accounting testimony to various courts and to the Senate of Canada.