Tom Darden '73 is the founder and chief executive officer of Cherokee, a Raleigh-based company that builds environmental technology businesses and remediates environmentally contaminated real estate. Tom began his career with Bain & Company in Boston, working with Bain from 1981 to 1984. Beginning in 1984, he served for 16 years as the chairman of Cherokee Sanford Group, the largest private brick manufacturing company in the United States and previously the Southeast’s largest soil remediation company. Tom earned a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar, a Master in Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a JD from Yale Law School.
