Edwin R. Gilliland

Edwin Richard Gilliland (1909–1973) was an American chemical engineer and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gilliland was born on July 10, 1909 in El Reno, Oklahoma and moved with his family to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1918. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in 1930 and an M.S. from the Pennsylvania State University in 1931. He received his Sc.D. from MIT in 1933 under the direction of Thomas Kilgore Sherwood for work on a wetted-wall column technique used in mass-transfer. With Professor Warren K. Lewis, Gilliland developed mathematical analyses of fractional distillation columns and both developed fluidized catalytic cracking techniques. He consulted...