Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot Medal

The Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot Medal was to recognise a major contribution to research in the area of transport phenomena and was named after three professors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA: R. Byron Bird, Warren Earl Stewart, and Edwin N Lightfoot.

In the 1950s, Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot developed an undergraduate course at the University of Wisconsin to integrate the teaching of fluid flow, heat transfer, and diffusion. From this beginning, they prepared the landmark textbook, Transport Phenomena, published in 1960. This textbook, referred to by generations of chemical engineers simply as BSL after its authors, would remain in print for 41 years and see five translations.