Ashish joined Akoya in 2024 to lead the Specialty Materials Sector. He is a results driven senior executive with over 30 years of expertise in the engineered materials industry spanning fibers, advanced composites, woven & non wovens, adhesives and ceramics. During Ashish’s career, he moved through executive roles in Innovation and Growth, Corporate Strategy/M&A, Operations, ultimately leading a multi-national business in multiple markets including Sealings, Renewables, Industrial, Aerospace/Defense and Filtration. His experience includes public companies, private equity owned and joint ventures/startups across the Specialty materials sector. Ashish is recognized as a transformational growth leader with a consistent record for improving earnings and developing leadership talent.
Prior to joining Akoya, Ashish was the Chief Supply Chain Officer at EOS energy, a grid storage battery manufacturer, responsible for establishing the supply chain, sourcing, manufacturing operations and new capital implementation in Pittsburgh to serve an order backlog of $450M and over 1GW of orders for 2023-2025.
Before joining EOS, Ashish served as President of the Performance Materials Business Unit at Lydall (NYSE: LDL) where he managed a global $325M P&L focused on selling engineered non woven media and specialty sealings for the Filtration market and Gasket sealing markets. Starting in 2020, he led the turnaround of an under-performing business by creating a collaborative leadership team focused on executing the 3 strategic pillars of growth, optimization and innovation that resulted in double digit revenue growth and EBITDA margins greater than 20%. The turnaround of this specialty materials business was key for the successful sale of Lydall to Unifrax (a portfolio company of Clearlake Capital) in Q4-2021.
In addition to his Lydall experience, Ashish held executive leadership roles at Owens Corning, U.S. Steel Corporation and Melior Innovations. Ashish spent almost 20 years at Owens Corning’s $2Bn Global Composites business in progressive roles from technical to marketing to General Management to Vice President of Innovations. At Owens Corning’s Composites group, Ashish’s teams delivered innovative applications for a variety of glass fiber based composites in automotive semi-structural parts, non-wovens and woven glass fabrics for asphaltic roof and industrial interior to being the pioneers of supplying the reinforcement for wind energy blades. At Owens Corning, Ashish was involved in multiple M&A and divestitures, in addition being on boards of JV startups with other large multinationals.
Ashish holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Materials Science from the University of Delaware. He is a distinguished alumnus of the Center for Composites Materials at the University of Delaware.
