An American chemical engineer and founding member of the National Academy of Engineering. After gaining his PhD at MIT, he was briefly assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute before returning to MIT in 1930 as assistant professor, eventually rising to professor and dean of engineering. On retirement from MIT in 1969 he became professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He published the first text on mass transfer in 1937 entitled Absorption and Extraction, which was republished in 1974 as Mass Transfer. The Sherwood number is named after him.