Edwin N. Lightfoot

Edwin Niblock Lightfoot Jr. was an American chemical engineer who spent most of his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he became Hilldale Professor and later Professor Emeritus of chemical and biological engineering. Born in 1925, he took his degrees at Cornell University in 1947 and 1950, then worked at General Foods and at Pfizer, where he received a patent for a commercial process to recover and purify vitamin B12. He began teaching at Wisconsin in 1953 and with R. Byron Bird and Warren E. Stewart wrote the classic textbook Transport Phenomena, which stayed in print in its first edition for forty-one years. His research concerned transport phenomena, biological mass transfer and separation processes, and he held several patents. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1979 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1995, and received the National Medal of Science in 2004. He died in 2017.