Emmett D. Crawford was born in Meridian, Mississippi, but grew up in Laurinburg, North Carolina. His father, a minister and director of admissions at St. Andrews Presbyterian College, and his mother, a teacher, divorced when Crawford was about ten, and he and his sister acquired new chores around the house. Crawford also had a paper route and then worked in photography and lithography when he was in high school. He found school mostly boring and loved to be outside. Interested in space, Crawford decided to major in meteorology at North Carolina State University, but when he heard that chemical engineering was the hardest subject he switched majors, intrigued by the challenge. Crawford's professor, Richard Felder, said Crawford was the best problem solver he had ever seen, and Crawford managed an almost perfect record throughout college. He had summer jobs at a peach farm and back at his old newspaper before he got his first job at Milliken Chemical Company, working mostly alone on counter-current extraction and finding this his first experience of chemical engineering in action. For graduate school Crawford chose the University of Massachusetts at Amherst because their polymer science and engineering program was small and afforded personal attention. There he worked with Alan Lesser, a new professor, and published several papers on epoxy resins; from these publications he drew his dissertation. Wanting to use his PhD in industry, Crawford chose a job at Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tennessee; he found the company well-regarded, the people congenial, and the location close to his own family. He began work on the mechanical behavior of plastics, trying, as he puts it, to come up with a tear-resistant pretzel bag. At Eastman TMCD (2,2,4,4-tetramethyl-1,3-cyclobutanediol) had been studied from a chemical perspective many times over the years, but Crawford brought his experience with materials science to studying it again and developed a new theory that produced a plastic combining durability with pliability, a theory that eventually was confirmed by small-scale testing. Supported by some of the management Crawford was able to bring what was given the name Tritan to commercial production. Crawford won the Society of Chemical Industry Gordon E. Moore Medal for developing Tritan. Since the launch of Tritan, Crawford has had to work on coloring problems and possible concerns about safety. He says he is still a data-driven scientist, but he is now mentoring new hires at Eastman. In addition, Crawford and his wife have had two children, and he has been fighting cancer. He works at balancing his life at work with his life at home and hopes to find time again to photograph waterfalls.