She is a research professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina, the co-founder of two graphics hardware companies, and the former president of ACM SIGGRAPH.
[3] She initially worked as a middle-school mathematics teacher, and earned a teaching-related master's degree from North Carolina State University in 1974.
[5] In 1976, she began studying computer graphics at North Carolina State, eventually earning a second master's degree in 1984.
[5] Ikonas was purchased by Adage, Inc., in 1982,[5] and in 1986 Whitton and England cofounded another company, Trancept Systems, producing graphics hardware for Sun Microsystems computers.
[7] The North Carolina State University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering elected Whitton to their alumni hall of fame in 2016.