Across almost 20 years with P&G, LaShaunda McNeil has advanced P&G Beauty’s innovation mastery through notable contributions in identifying and understanding mechanisms of action for formulation technologies and creating new testing methods, spanning biological, clinical and imaging approaches, that enable development of innovative product formulas for brands like Olay, Pantene and Old Spice.
Currently, LaShaunda works across P&G Beauty’s global brand portfolio to enable Clinical and Consumer understanding, overseeing technical consumer learnings and clinical testing programs that inform product usage insights, performance claims and more, leading a team of more than 40 scientists and researchers.
Through this and previous roles, LaShaunda has supported growth on P&G Beauty’s leading brands (Old Spice, Secret, Olay, Native, Head & Shoulders, Pantene and SK-II) and contributed to innovations serving markets in North America, Europe and China. As a senior R&D director for P&G’s global skin care product development organization, she led creation of the brand’s strategic product and packaging platforms, resulting in holistic designs that enabled new-to-market forms and benefit spaces for the Olay & Native brands, including the launch of Olay Super Serum to the North America and Europe markets.
Recognizing then-emerging opportunities to deepen understanding of and testing for African-American hair types, LaShaunda helped pioneer creation of P&G Hair Care’s Centric Team in 2012, bringing together four Black Ph.D. scientists, each with distinctive technical expertise and authentic perspectives, to advance P&G’s innovation approaches to better serve African American consumers.
Their efforts informed innovation and branding strategies for P&G’s Hair Care portfolio, specifically resulting in novel technical understanding of multiethnic hair, new evaluation approaches, new chemical analysis approaches, and P&G’s first-ever clinical study of scalp and hair health completed entirely with African Ancestry panelists. These collective efforts resulted in selections of new ingredients, formulations and product prototypes, all designed specifically for African Ancestry hair, informing the launch of Pantene Gold Series in North America (2017) and Head & Shoulders’ market entry to Sub-Saharan Africa (2016). This groundbreaking work continued to inspire further integration of multiethnic hair and skin understanding across P&G Beauty’s businesses, leading to subsequent launches of Head & Shoulders Royal Oils as well as formulation designs for the My Black is Beautiful hair care range.
The Centric Team’s collective efforts to strengthen P&G’s ability to meaningfully innovate for multiethnic consumers was recognized in 2016 with P&G’s R&D Pathfinder Award, recognizing exceptional innovation leadership that creates breakthrough innovation capabilities. As part of Pantene’s broader Gold Series multifunctional team, LaShaunda was additionally recognized by P&G’s Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer for enabling and nurturing a culture of innovation.
A passionate advocate for innovating new testing and assessment approaches, LaShaunda subsequently led an upstream innovation team in creating a proprietary digital tool that advances consumer understanding methodologies to inform improved ingredient selections that better meet consumer expectations across performance, safety and sustainability values, used today across P&G Beauty’s business. LaShaunda again received P&G’s Pathfinder Award in 2020 for this work.
Today, LaShaunda continues to seek out new testing & learning approaches that deepen consumer understanding and help technical teams create meaningful solutions that serve more consumers around the world. Her passion for cultivating growth of business and people alike fuels her to take an active role in building teams, mentoring and especially, coaching young people, professionals and students.
Prior to joining P&G, LaShaunda was an NIH post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. Foundational to her work was the completion of the Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A native of Chicago, LaShaunda now lives in Cincinnati with her husband, Granada, and their son, William.