At the end of 2025, Behnam Pourdeyhimi stepped down from his role as executive director of The Nonwovens Institute (NWI), after more than a quarter-century leading the organization. Taking over for Pourdeyhimi is Raoul Farer, who was formerly the executive deputy director of NWI and a professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science at North Carolina State University.

“I was thrilled that Raoul joined NC State last year,” Pourdeyhimi says. “I’ve been incredibly impressed with his accomplishments and firmly believe he is the right choice to lead the institute into the future.”

When Pourdeyhimi first joined NC State himself, over 25 years ago, it was in part to take on a leadership role in what was then known as the Nonwovens Cooperative Research Center (NCRC). Under his vision, NCRC morphed into NWI — becoming the world’s first accredited academic program for the interdisciplinary field of engineered fabrics.

NCRC was established in 1991 as a State/Industry-University Cooperative Research Center with matching grants from the National Science Foundation, the State of North Carolina and several industry partners. Upon the conclusion of NSF grant funding in the 1998-99 academic year — the same time Pourdeyhimi got to NC State — NCRC had to become self-sustaining.  

“I remember well the challenges we overcame and the opportunities we seized along the way,” Pourdeyhimi says.

In 2007, NCRC was discontinued and all of its programs were merged into the newly established NWI. Over the next three years, Pourdeyhimi would oversee the launch of two new state-of-the-art pilot labs — the Staple Nonwovens Lab, in 2008, and the Meltblown Lab, in 2010 — in addition to what’s today known as the Spunbond and Hydroentangling Lab, which first opened in 2002. 

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, NWI’s unique facilities and equipment were quickly repurposed to respond to the rising demand for materials required to produce the face masks frontline workers needed to protect themselves. Pourdeyhimi and his team at NWI created a new spunbond material that can serve as an effective filter without the need for additional, meltblown material — which takes more time to produce — normally used for the filtration layer.

“We took the spunbond technology and created a new generation of unique filters that have excellent filtering capability and can potentially be reused after cleaning with peroxide, or potentially an alcohol solution. Because these materials are strong, unlike classical meltblown filters, they can also be cut and sewn by traditional techniques,” Pourdeyhimi said at the time.

One of NWI’s production lines started producing up to 20,000 meters of spunbond material per day, as the institute partnered with Brooks Brothers to provide large amounts of spunbond nonwoven material to the clothing company’s manufacturing facilities. Meanwhile, NWI’s meltblowing pilot line continued making the classical meltblown material needed for N95 respirators and surgical masks.

More recently, in 2022, NC State and NWI reached a new research agreement with Under Armour to accelerate new discoveries’ journey from the lab to the marketplace. 

“Transformative innovation is driven by partnerships between industry and academia. Our collaborations with Under Armour will rethink the future of fiber and materials to develop new solutions,” Pourdeyhimi said in a news release about the research agreement.