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A year ago, the composites industry lost a young, dynamic, energetic and accomplished leader who made a significant impact on the people and companies he worked for and with. Here, ÂÌñÏ×ÆÞ looks back on the life, legacy and work of Carmelo Lo Faro. Through interviews with former colleagues, customers and friends, we found in Lo Faro a rare combination of engineering expertise and passionate leadership that fostered deep respect for his work, about the promise of composite materials and, perhaps most importantly, the people he worked with. He leaves behind colleagues and customers profoundly impacted by his service to the industry, his mentorship and friendship.

A problem-solver and an innovator

Lo Faro, who grew up and was educated in Italy, had known about composite materials and manufacturing from a relatively young age, primarily through his interest in space travel and the U.S. Space Shuttle program. However, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that Lo Faro first entered the composites industry. After he completed his undergraduate work, he was offered a position in ICI Fiberite’s industrial trainee program. Through that, he had his Ph.D. in education in Sicily sponsored by the company, a supplier of prepregs, tapes, molding compounds and thermoplastic materials, with particular focus on aerospace applications. In 1997, ICI sold its Fiberite business to competitor Cytec. With Ph.D. in hand, Lo Faro joined Cytec in 1998 at the company’s facility in Wilton, U.K. His first supervisor was Rob Maskell, chief scientist.

Maskell says one of the first projects he put Lo Faro on revolved around polymer chemistry — not an obvious fit given Lo Faro’s engineering education. Still, Maskell wanted to see what Lo Faro could do. The project involved an experiment that the chemists on staff at Cytec said could not be done. “Carmelo,” Maskell says, “was tenacious enough to make it work. He wasn’t a chemist, but he was a problem-solver and a doer. And he got it done.”

After that, Maskell says, he recognized in Lo Faro two other attributes that he took quick advantage of. First, Lo Faro was highly adaptable and willing to try new things — new technologies, new applications to make parts. Second, Lo Faro was excellent with customers. Because of this, Maskell started embedding Lo Faro within customer facilities to kick off application engineering projects.

Around 2000-2001, Lo Faro transitioned into a full-time role at Cytec. Maskell says that as his working relationship with Lo Faro evolved, Lo Faro’s business acumen became more apparent and more valuable. As a result, Maskell tended to focus on academic and technical responsibilities while Lo Faro handled customer-facing responsibilities. It was during this time that Maskell began to see Lo Faro’s interpersonal skills more clearly. “Carmelo was always willing to display his honest openness,” Maskell says. “If he didn’t know the answer to something, he would admit it — and then find the answer. And he always asked for advice. He didn’t always need it, but he asked for it anyway.”

A visionary leader

Also working for Cytec at the time was Patricia Harrison, currently head of business operations at Syensqo. She was in a business development role at the time but had a background as a chemist. She first met Lo Faro via Maskell when Lo Faro joined Cytec as an intern. “Rob always introduced the new scientists and engineers,” Harrison says. “Carmelo made an impression. He was a whirling dervish, always running around the labs. He was a fireball of energy. This guy was different in all the right ways.”

Harrison says Lo Faro earned a reputation for challenging the status quo and aggressively seeking innovative solutions to vexing challenges. “Carmelo had no chains,” she says. “He was a challenger and he was outspoken. He was often sent in to address the most difficult problems with our most important customers. We would not have gotten as far as we did without him.”

One of those challenging products was Cytec’s Priform, an epoxy hardener in fiber form that dissolved on contact with epoxy. Lo Faro was tasked with working out tooling solutions for Priform, how it might be applied and the manufacturing process best suited for it (RTM, it turns out). On top of that, all of this was done not as an R&T project, but a real-life parts manufacturing process. “It was about how to make parts,” Maskell says, “for customers like Boeing, FACC and others. This was not a pilot project and required significant Cytec investment.”

A family man and influential mentor

Another person who met Lo Faro in his very early days, before Cytec, was Marc Doyle. Doyle is currently VP of the composites material business for Syensqo and does commercial front-end, engineering, marketing, sales, demand management and other customer-facing work for the company. Doyle says he first met Lo Faro in 1998-1999 — before Doyle joined Cytec — at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) when Lo Faro “came barging in” holding a tray that contained a new resin system — one Lo Faro had named after his wife. “He was so enthusiastic and ambitious,” Doyle says. “But he was also a family man. He loved his family and he loved his work.”

Doyle, after a few years, left his job, but then joined Cytec in 2003, where he worked with Lo Faro doing application engineering. “We literally worked side-by-side for 15 years,” Doyle says. “We were the first application engineers that Cytec had and we did everything together. I think I spent more time with him than my wife and parents combined.”

Doyle adds: “Carmelo always had great ideas — especially for aerospace applications — and had the ability to sell them. And if we both agreed an idea was good, he would sell it and then I stepped in with a team of colleagues to make it happen. It was a very fun time.”

An example of this Doyle points to was when Cytec endeavored to become a second-source supplier of primary structure prepreg for the Boeing 777X. “Honestly, nobody believed that was possible,” Doyle says. “We were up against some unusual forces in that case, but Carmelo was able to sell the idea. I mean, straight up to the CTO of Boeing. So that’s an example of the kind of idea that I think only somebody like him can turn what would be more of a dream for most people, into reality.”

To this day, says Doyle, he still finds himself looking at problems, challenges and ideas through a Lo Faro lens. “His influence, to me personally, is everlasting,” Doyle says. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about how Carmelo would think or do or say or feel about a certain situation. And, more often than not, I come out with pretty decent insight. I don’t know if that’s me or him or what, but it makes me look at the topic in a clear, simple, more essential way.”

Lo Faro earned a series of promotions up the ladder and into other Cytec facilities, including the company’s manufacturing plant in Wrexham, Wales. Throughout this time, Maskell and Harrison say, Lo Faro kept in touch with his mentors. “He was intensely loyal,” Maskell says. “And he expected loyalty in return. He and I remained very close throughout his career.”

Harrison, looking back, recalls telling Lo Faro one day in Tempe, “Carmelo, we’ll all be working for you someday.” She was right.

It was at Wrexham that Lo Faro’s people skills, already apparent, became     more prominent. The Wrexham facility produces resin systems, adhesives and other chemical components of composite materials. In his work, Lo Faro was tasked with a variety of jobs that took him all over the plant, interacting not just with other engineers and management personnel, but the workers themselves managing the machinery and materials. Maskell says Lo Faro’s gregariousness and outgoing nature helped him make quick friends with everyone.

“Carmelo was famous, from very early on,” says Maskell, “for stopping to talk to everyone in the facility, from the custodian to the plant manager. And it wasn’t just talk. He got to know them — their history, their families, their interests. And then he remembered them and when he saw them again. This was highly unusual and highly appreciated by everyone he worked with.”

Lo Faro himself references this in a 2020 interview on a CW Talks podcast: “I have a simple belief that your knowledge matters a lot less than your attitude and your behaviors. And what this means is that, at the end of the day, whenever we have people that have demonstrated the right behaviors, the right attitude, the right leadership, I think we can put these people on almost every project.”

An inspiring and empowering leader

Another of Lo Faro’s close colleagues was Eddy Depase, currently head of marketing and NBD at Syensqo. Depase says he met Lo Faro a few times before 2009, once at Ferrari and once at Boeing. Then, in 2010, Depase was working at Boeing and was approached by Carmelo to discuss employment opportunities at Cytec. He was on vacation when he got a call from Lo Faro. “He offered me a job,” Depase says. “I refused it, but as soon as I put down the phone, I realized I had made a mistake. I called him back and accepted. It was more of an instinct thing. Carmelo’s vision and attitude made me reconsider and it was the best decision for me. He had a  way of bringing people together and I wanted to be a part of that.”

Depase was hired into the Applications group. In this role, he discovered a quality of Lo Faro’s that was cherished and not often recognized. “Carmelo’s leadership style was to delegate, but support, and that’s something I really appreciated,” Depase says. “He trusted me with responsibility, but he never left me hanging. There’s a fine balance to this type of management style.”

Depase also echoes the sentiment others shared about Lo Faro’s connection to colleagues. “He always had time for his employees,” adds Depase. “Always. Even when he was president of an organization of thousands of people, I could send him a note and say, ‘Carmelo, I want to talk to you’ or ‘I want to touch base with you.’ Within that same afternoon he would find time to call me. Always.”

Depase and Doyle agreed that Lo Faro’s enthusiasm for an idea or a project or a mission was contagious and empowering. “A lot of people that were part of his teams, where he had a vision, would have gone through a wall for him,” Depase says. “It was a combination of his personality, his vision, the fact that he was there with you, the fact that you felt empowered, you felt that he valued your opinion and that he listened to your opinion. That made me incredibly proud when he would ask my opinion. A guy like him asking me my opinion, it was such an honor.”

A champion of integrity and trust

During his work at Wrexham, Lo Faro worked across other Cytec facilities in Europe, focusing more on R&T, but still interacting with customers and other Cytec employees. It was during this time that he first intersected with Bill Wood, then general manager of Cytec Europe. Wood says that although Lo Faro was still relatively young, he’d already made a name for himself within the company. That said, Wood was not prepared to be as impressed as he was by Lo Faro. Wood says he brought to the company a rare combination of curiosity, intellect, energy and pure likeability that made everyone want to be part of what he was doing.

“What really impressed me about him was not just his intellectual capability and his capabilities in R&T, but he was just so curious and so interested,” Wood says. “He just wanted to understand the industry. He wanted to understand people. And then underpinning was just this infectious energy. I mean, people just wanted to be a part of his team — just wanted to be a part of the projects he was working on.”

This extended, says Wood, to customer relationships as well. Wood notes that there can be, in any supplier/customer relationship, a reluctance by the supplier to own mistakes that impact the customer and the customer’s product. He says Cytec was not immune to that tendency from time to time. In Lo Faro, however, Cytec had someone who wasn’t just passionate about composite materials, but passionate about seeing them succeed. And seeing them succeed meant being willing to acknowledge when they failed and taking the steps necessary to make them work.

“I’ll give you a generic example,” Wood says. “Let’s say you have a major customer experiencing a significant performance problem with your product. You might be able to help the customer tweak the process to solve the immediate problem. But there’s almost always an underlying cause that sometimes goes unaddressed. Carmelo wanted to address that cause. He would find a way to get all of us on board, dealing with the customer directly and honestly about the problem. He would give us the best chance to work through the challenge with them. This is not easy work, but it’s the kind of work that engenders great trust with the customer. And that’s the kind of trust Carmelo helped Cytec earn.”

Wood was promoted and moved back to Tempe. He asked Lo Faro to join him there as VP of technology. While back in Arizona, Lo Faro also returned to school, earning his MBA from the Thunderbird School of International Management at Arizona State University. In 2012, Cytec expanded its manufacturing and technology footprint with the acquisition of Umeco. This put Lo Faro in contact with a new group of composites professionals.

A legacy of inspiration

One of those was Claire Michel, currently marketing communications director at Syensqo, who handled communications at Umeco and then assumed the same role at Cytec. She first met Lo Faro in July 2012 in a series of meetings designed to integrate Umeco and harmonize the communication strategies of the newly joined companies.

“These meetings were uncomfortable and odd, you know — you are being acquired by a competitor. It’s not an easy feeling,” Michel remembers. “But in comes Carmelo, and he’s smiling, happy and showing interest in meeting new people. He was clearly senior and a decision maker yet very approachable from the very start. He was unlike anyone I’d ever met. Years later I was surprised to hear that he remembered that was the first time we met and his impression of me then.”

Michel worked with Lo Faro throughout the next 12 years and enjoyed a relationship with him that was, as others testified, unlike any other they had in their professional life: “I felt lucky to get to work with him and to have his trust. He regularly asked me for my opinion, for my insights in how the sites were doing and he involved me in strategic projects to lead on communication aspects. In return, he was very open with me, sharing advice and guidance as a senior company colleague and as a friend, which hugely helped me in my career. And I know he did the same for many others. He told me that each day he would first answer customer emails, then colleagues and then everybody else.”

Carmelo believed in communication — and valued the opportunity to communicate internally to foster the right culture and mindset. “Over the years I learned to think the way he thought and speak the way he did as I was writing many of his internal memos,” Michel continues. “This became critical during COVID-19 when I helped him stay close to his employees — teammates as he called them — through written and video messages.

“Everyone genuinely liked and respected him because he was so earnest and passionate — about composites, about the company, about the people he worked with, about his family, about life,” Michel says. “I considered him a friend and cherished any interaction I had with him. I never wanted to let him down.”

In 2015, Cytec was acquired by Solvay and became Solvay Composite Materials, headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia. Two years later, in 2017, Wood retired and Lo Faro was promoted to president of Solvay Composite Materials.

Business savvy and customer-focused

Throughout his career, Lo Faro was extremely well known for his customer interactions and relationships, particularly in the aerospace and defense end markets. As colleagues above have testified, Lo Faro became famous for advancing new ideas, new technologies and new applications, building teams to bring those innovations to market. One of Cytec’s and, by extension Lo Faro’s, most important projects was the F-35, for which Syensqo is a primary material supplier.

Jeff Hendrix is a U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) consultant who has worked for more than 30 years on development of composite structures for major aircraft programs supporting the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy. He has worked, among others, with Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and first intersected with Lo Faro around 2011. Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the F-35, was making decisions about future materials needs and Hendrix was tasked with aligning Cytec with those needs. Lo Faro’s increasing roles with Cytec put him in more frequent contact with Hendrix.

Hendrix says Lo Faro was always keenly interested in how Solvay could do more to support DOD programs. “He really was a patriot of his adopted country in the U.S. He recognized that freedom comes at a cost and he was very keen on making sure that Solvay supported the defense business, even though in the grand scheme of things defense business is not near as big as the commercial aircraft business. He knew that not every decision was a dollars and cents, ROI, money decision and he was very good and very supportive of doing things that were incredibly helpful to the DOD side of the business.”

This philosophy turned into a desire Lo Faro developed to do the “right” thing, even if that right thing was not optimal for Solvay. “And that may not have been what Cytec’s contract called for,” Hendrix says. “He wasn’t the type who would say, ‘Well, that’s not what the contract says. The contract says this is what I have to do. You’re asking me to do something more so I’m not going to do it.’ If it was the right thing to do, Carmelo was always supportive and doing the right thing.”

Further, Lo Faro’s deep connection with his colleagues was apparent even to Hendrix, who was on the outside looking in. “You don’t always see that level of connectedness in leaders,” Hendrix says. “Particularly as you get to higher levels of the organization. Sometimes leaders tend to lose touch with the everyday workers. I don’t believe Carmelo ever did. So those are just sort of some of the things that I think made him special and unique.”

Also part of Lo Faro’s deep history is Vincent D’Arienzo, currently a Technical Fellow at Bell Helicopter. D’Arienzo and Lo Faro first met when Lo Faro was still in his Ph.D. program, but they maintained a professional and personal relationship throughout Lo Faro’s career. D’Arienzo’s first impression was that Lo Faro was extremely bright and fast learner, but he soon discovered deeper and more significant talents. D’Arienzo describes Lo Faro as a “whole person,” someone who shared openly his business, personal, family and career interests, and encouraged those he worked with to do the same. He remembers Lo Faro as a soccer-obsessed, energetic, family-oriented, visionary thinker who valued personal relationships above all else.

“He would take the time to talk to you personally about your personal life, your family life, your health, your career and then the business side came in,” D’Arienzo says. “He was genuine. If he knew you had a personal issue coming or something happening in your personal life, he would actually stay in contact. He was a remarkable person.”

D’Arienzo also notes that as Lo Faro rose through the ranks at Cytec and began to manage the company’s R&T efforts, he faced significant obstacles for which he seemed to be uniquely equipped to handle. First, says D’Arienzo, although Cytec was a carbon fiber producer, it did not produce much fiber. As a result, the company was compelled to work cooperatively with other fiber manufacturers, which was a strong suit of Lo Faro’s.

Second, although Cytec had a presence in the U.S., it was Lo Faro’s European connections that opened doors for the company there, “put Cytec on the map” and created the relationships that led, eventually, to the acquisition by Solvay.

Third, D’Arienzo says, especially after Lo Faro became president of Solvay Composites Materials, “Carmelo was not confined to short-term goals and quarterly financial targets and the Wall Street Model. He was always thinking long term and planning for a future that many of us could not yet see.”

Fourth, D’Arienzo very much respected how transparent Lo Faro was. “He was so focused on solutions and on helping the customer,” he says. “Carmelo would say, ‘We need you to work with us to solve this problem.’ Whatever it is. But he wanted to find the cause of the challenge, not the symptom. And he would ask you to work on that with him. There was sort of a transparency with Carmelo that a lot of suppliers just don’t often provide.”

Finally, he says, Lo Faro’s leadership created opportunities that are in short supply in the composites industry. “Carmelo was a bridge-builder,” D’Arienzo says. “He saw things — products, technologies — in other markets and applications and encouraged people like me to look for ways to apply those in other ways. Similarly, he brought companies together that don’t normally work together. He synergized a lot of different people. I watched him put together companies that don’t even talk to each other in the same room to work together.”

A lasting influence

Another colleague from the OEM community is Jeff Carpenter, senior director raw material supply chain at Boeing Commercial Aircraft. Carpenter first met Lo Faro around 2011 at a Boeing Supplier Conference in San Diego, California. Carpenter was new to his job at the time and was highly sought after by suppliers attending the event. Carpenter says there was one person — Lo Faro — who was most persistent. “Not rude or pushy, but just persistent,” he says. “Really persistent.” On top of that, Carpenter says, Lo Faro did not want to meet at the conference itself, but at a restaurant for lunch.

“I'm sitting outside in the little dining area on the sidewalk with a little fence around it,” Carpenter remembers. “And I see this nicely dressed guy looking around. I think this must be him. And I stood up and said, ‘Are you Carmelo?’ He hops over the fence, sits down and we start talking. That was my introduction to Carmelo.”

Two things, says Carpenter, struck him right away about Lo Faro: First, he was really smart. Second, he valued relationships. “Perhaps more so than anyone I’ve ever known in the aerospace supply chain,” Carpenter notes. “Right from the start, he didn’t want to meet in a business environment. He wanted to meet in a social setting. He wanted to have some quiet time over a meal. That was it.”

As this relationship evolved, Carpenter got to know and appreciate the strengths that Lo Faro brought to Boeing. “Boeing has a really very special tactical relationship with our three carbon fiber suppliers, Toray, Hexcel and Syensqo [Solvay became Syensqo in 2024],” Carpenter notes. “This is the kind of relationship that involves our chief technology officers. And Carmelo and his team were very personally engaged in these relationships. For example, he and they would come out and meet people like John Tracy, who was our CTO for many, many years. Carmelo made sure he had a sort of personal thumbprint on the key or big projects. That was a level of involvement we did not always get from a lot of leaders.”

The relationship Lo Faro established with Boeing culminated in 2022 with Solvay being named a Boeing Supplier of the Year. Carpenter says Solvay won that award not because Solvay excelled, but because Lo Faro had created an environment in which a failure was turned into a success for a customer. And that customer was Boeing.

“Solvay was actually performing badly,” Carpenter says, “because of supply chain shortages post-COVID. Getting base chemicals was just difficult for everybody. Solvay was not immune to that and they were suffering. Boeing offered to help and Carmelo said, ‘You bet. Come on in. Let’s work together.’ He was totally transparent. And before I knew it, I was on the phone with suppliers I’ve never heard of trying to help Solvay find magic chemical number four or input thing number two. And we solved the problem. And Solvay got the award because of their transparency. Most of the suppliers we work with are like, ‘Leave me alone. Let me just work it out and I’ll get back to you.’ That was not Carmelo.”

Ultimately, says Carpenter, he hopes that everyone — composites professionals and the Lo Faro family — can understand and appreciate that there is not a single Boeing aircraft that does not make use of a Syensqo material. “Every single aircraft. And we have Carmelo to thank for much of that.”

Humility and respect

There is one person who stands out because he was not only a customer of Syensqo and Lo Faro, but a colleague as well. Gary Bond was, for many years, a Fellow at Boeing and worked on development of composite materials and processes for primary structures for military and commercial programs. Bond recalls meeting Lo Faro for the first time in the mid-2010s at a SAMPE conference. He was standing outside a ballroom after listening to the keynote speaker when Lo Faro walked up and introduced himself.

“I had heard his name and I kind of knew who he was from my Boeing colleagues,” Bond says. “But as soon as I met him, I felt like I had known him all my life. He just had that ability to connect with people and make you feel like you were his best friend and that you’ve known him for years. It’s kind of unusual, especially in the engineering world, that you have people with such skills, but he just made you feel like he had a deep, long relationship with you and was very interested in the stuff you had to say.”

One of the key materials that Bond and Lo Faro worked on was development of a resin system that would come to be called 5320-1, funded through a DARPA program called Non Autoclave Manufacturing Technology. Bond was the principal investigator on the program and saw the material become a baseline resin system for many composite defense applications.

Bond left Boeing in late 2020 and a month later joined Solvay, in part because of Lo Faro’s influence. At Solvay, Bond did not report directly to Lo Faro, but they did share ideas, and Lo Faro often sought Bond’s input on new materials, technologies and process developments.

“One of the things that I really respected about Carmelo was that although he was very smart, he recognized that he was better and smarter when he was surrounded by good people,” Bond recalls. “And so he would reach out to people to get their perspective on stuff to get their input. He was not afraid to draw on other people's expertise.”

One of Bond’s comments into Lo Faro’s modus operandi revolved around a strategy pilots use when executing flying maneuvers. Bond, who is a pilot himself, says, “In the piloting world, we have an expression that says, ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast.’ The idea is that instead of making sudden changes to the control inputs, you do something nice and smooth and slow, and that ends up being a faster way to get there. I told Carmelo, ‘You need to kind of get that. Convey that to your people that we’re going to get there, but we’re not going to make these huge sudden changes. We’re going to do this deliberately and it’s going to end up being faster for us.’ Carmelo jumped all over that and he really bought into it. So, he was very open to other people’s inputs and willing to listen. That was one of the things I really enjoyed about my relationship with Carmelo.”

Exploring new horizons

In 2023, Bond left Solvay to join RTX affiliate Pratt & Whitney (P&W). Soon after, Lo Faro surprised the composites community at large, and Solvay colleagues in particular, by joining Bond at RTX and almost immediately after, P&W. This occurred just prior to Solvay’s demerger, that Lo Faro helped implement, which moved the company’s composites business into a new entity called Syensqo.

Bond says Lo Faro’s early days at P&W were a challenge. “Not long after he got there, they threw him into one of the toughest positions, I think, which was the powdered nickel metal problem that some turbines had,” says Bond. “This was not really his expertise, technically, but I think they recognized his leadership abilities and that he was the right guy for the job. I think it was an extremely high-stress job, but as usual, he attacked it with passion and jumped right in. He just wanted to learn everything he possibly could about the issues, both from a technical standpoint as well as how to work with the airlines and how to best convey what we are doing from a safety standpoint.”

Shane Eddy, president of P&W, had this to say about Lo Faro’s brief tenure at the company: “He purposely split his time between visiting key sites and meeting with members of the team on an individual basis. He went to great lengths to learn more about our people and our purpose. His experience and intentional leadership helped remove barriers and better positioned us for success in our efforts to recover the GTF program. Carmelo challenged us to build trust and relationships across various teams within the company. He instilled a structure and cadence to tiered engagement with our team that drove focus on the resources needed by the team to accomplish the mission. His passion for our team and our purpose was evident in every engagement, and he relentlessly championed inclusion, accountability and teamwork.”

The value of curiosity

Lo Faro’s 2020 CW Talks interview finishes with an answer to a question about curiosity and innovation. That answer is worth repeating here:

“It's been a long time since I was a child myself — I believe that children are inherently extremely curious; children are extremely excited by exploring and by solving problems. And you know, ultimately, they can be very happy. Every single day I’ve worked in this business has been the ability to do that, so what I really would like is that we help our children discover or rediscover that. Be excited about seeing a spaceship going to the moon, being excited about the engine of a fighter jet, being excited about having a plane that you can pilot from your room. That’s something that I believe will provide inspiration. And I think it is our job to inspire the younger generation and have them understand that, you know, ultimately, the answers to humanity’s problems are going to be [found] through science and technology. Nothing else.”