Sean Fagin (’91)

As a student at CBU, Sean Fagin was an active member of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society, and the student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. But his fondest memory is meeting Laura Nickloy (BSBA ’90), to whom he has been married for 31 years.

When Sean graduated with his BS in Chemical Engineering in 1991, he went to work as an R&D Engineer at Procter & Gamble, where he was involved in developing paper-processing technology which led to two U.S. patents related to the modification of tissue paper via chemical softening techniques. He remained at Procter & Gamble for 23 years but migrated from the engineering field into the world of finance. He received his MBA with a concentration in Finance from the University of Cincinnati in 1996 and was certified as a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) in 2004.

He took a position with General Cable, a multinational cable manufacturing company, in 2014 as Director of Global Treasury — earning the designation of Certified Treasury Professional in 2015 — and moved up the ladder to CFO of the Latin America Region and CFO of the North America Region before relocating from Cincinnati to North Carolina as Senior VP and CFO of JELD-WEN, Inc., one of the world’s largest manufacturers of doors and windows. Since 2020, Sean has been CFO of JPW Industries, a tool and machinery manufacturer located in the Metro Nashville area.

Sean has also been very active in his church and his community over the years. He is a founding member of the Leadership Team at Mother Teresa Catholic Church in Nolensville, TN has been a quarterly donor to the American Red Cross since 2020, having reached the Half-Gallon Donor level. In his prior communities, he has served on the Charlotte Heart Ball Executive Leadership Team of the American Heart Association in Charlotte, NC; on the Diocesan Family Life Ministry Advisory Board of the Diocese of Covington, KY; and as Finance Council Member and Capital Campaign Co-Chair for St. Timothy Church in Union KY.

Sean and Laura currently live in Nashville. They have three children — Chris, a CBU Lasallian Fellow and 2020 CBU graduate who is now a seminarian at the Catholic Diocese of Memphis; Kyle, who is entering his senior year as a Mechanical Engineering major at the University of Tennessee; and Gabby, who is entering 8th grade.

The CBU faculty included so many examples of people who exhibited a combination of excellence, humility, and genuine caring for their students. These men and women could teach in bigger and more well-known places than CBU, but they lived out their lives in excellent service to the CBU and Memphis communities they loved. This taught me always to joyfully pursue excellence with humility and caring for others.”