Warren Kendall Lewis was a major leader in the development of chemical engineering in the United States. He has often been referred to as the father of modern chemical engineering for his role in coordination of chemistry, physics and engineering into an independent discipline serving the chemical industry. Warren K. Lewis was born in 1882, in Sussex County, Delaware, and graduated in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1905. He served one year in that institute as laboratory assistant in industrial chemistry, after which he studied for two years in Germany, taking his doctor's degree under Abegg and Ladenburg at the University of Breslau. In 1909 he became chemist for a tannery and leatherboard mill. His work has focussed mainly on filtration, distillation and absorption, the thermal properties of materials and the chemistry of colloids and amorphous materials.  In 1965, he received the National Medal Of Science. He died on March 9, 1975 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, United States.