Tom Daugherty

“It has been a great privilege to spend nearly 45 years collaborating with so many talented individuals in this industry to improve the lives of consumers worldwide. I am truly humbled to receive the INDA Lifetime Technical Achievement Award. My deepest thanks to my colleagues at P&G, partners across the supply sector, The Nonwovens Institute at NC State, the INDA community, and my wife and family for their amazing partnership. Here’s to the next generation of innovation!”

Tom Daugherty’s career spans decades of service to the nonwovens industry, both in industry R&D leadership roles at Procter & Gamble where he first retired in 2016, and also in a unique industry-academic partnership role at The Nonwovens Institute at NC State, where he retired in 2025.

Throughout, he was dedicated to the idea of driving business growth through innovation, and doing this by working to improve consumer’s lives with delightful benefits and winning with consumers vs. the best competition. Other powerful innovation themes included focus on platform technologies that could be leveraged for multi-generational initiatives to meet consumer needs, and to allocate balanced effort across the different innovation types to build, transform, and create markets.

He advanced through R&D positions spanning upstream technology development, business unit product development, and initiative launch. And through his collaboration as a part of multidisciplinary teams representing, in varied capacities, global brands such as Pampers, Luvs, Always, Naturella, Bounty, Swiffer, Mr. Clean, and others, he contributed to product and process technologies that have been used hundreds of billions of times by consumers around the world.

Nonwoven specific innovations include developing benefits and functions related to comfort, resilience, softness, wettability, fluid handling, apertures, mechanical fastening, carrier for skin care ingredients, barrier for leakage prevention, surface cleaning, personal care skin cleaning, and stretch. And at The Nonwovens Institute, it was an honor to contribute to the delivery of filtration products needed for health care during the COVID pandemic.

Recognizing the importance of contributing to building the business, and to building organizational and industry capability, Tom was also very active in industry service roles. He served on the INDA Board of Directors from 2007 to 2009 and later as a member of the INDA Executive Committee from 2010 to 2016. In addition, he played a significant role at The Nonwovens Institute (NWI), serving on its Executive Committee from 2003 to 2016, including as Chair from 2006 to 2008, and as Chair of the NWI Scientific Advisory Board from 2010 to 2016. And in his second career at The Nonwovens Institute, Daugherty brought enthusiasm and strategic leadership to the organization, helping support its continued growth and success.

Tom commented upon the highlights of his long and multi-faceted career, “The absolute best part of my career was having the opportunity and privilege to collaborate with so many talented people in the nonwovens industry. Collaboration is the most powerful, and fun, way to create and deliver business results.”