Charlie Martin, president and GM of Leistritz Extrusion North America and an internationally recognized expert on twin-screw extruders, has died, the company announced July 13.

Despite the high regard of his peers, he told Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing in 2020 that he used the term “expert” loosely.

“Once you think you are an expert, you are not, but I was always observing, always watching, always asking questions, always trying to learn from people,” he said.

“That sentence captures the way Charlie approached his profession,” the company posted on LinkedIn. “Despite decades of experience, he never regarded knowledge as complete. He observed closely, asked questions and sought dialogue with customers, universities and fellow experts. That openness shaped both his work and his contribution to the advancement of extrusion technology. Our thoughts are with Charlie’s family, his friends and all our colleagues in North America. We will remember Charlie with gratitude and deep respect.”

Leistritz Extrusion, Somerville, N.J., which is part of Leistritz Extrusiontechnik GmbH, Nürnberg, Germany, provides equipment and engineering services to the plastics, medical and pharmaceutical industries, and sells and services Leistritz equipment in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Colombia.

Martin served on the board of directors for the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) Extrusion Division and the Polymer Processing Institute at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and on the technical advisory board for Teel Plastics.

He earned his undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College in 1983 and an MBA from Rutgers University in 1990.

Martin’s plastics career began in 1984 at Killion Extruders. He secured a sales position there after realizing he had cut the lawn of founder Fred Killion while he was running a landscaping business in high school, he told Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing in 2020.

“It was a great learning experience in that I learned the machines from the nuts and bolts up — heaters, dies, screws, barrels, controllers — and it gave me the opportunity to interface with a wide range of customers and to help them get their machines up and running sometimes in somewhat stressful situations. It was a great first job for me in the plastics industry,” he said.

He had not expected his career to lead to plastics.

“When I went in for the interview, I had to look up in the dictionary what an extruder was. The only thing I will say is that Gettysburg [College] is a liberal arts school and because of that, I had to take two years of physics, so I was not completely devoid of technical background,” he said.

He taught himself the business by reading textbooks and seeking out industry experts, and said he learned a great deal from Bill Thiele, former GM of Leistritz, where he got a job in 1990 after Killion Extruders was sold to a holding company.

During his tenure at Leistritz, the company expanded the use of twin-screw extrusion technology into new areas and developed integrated upstream and downstream systems for direct extrusion, going from the raw materials to the final part.

“What has been key to the success here at Leistritz ... has been identifying new markets like metal injection molding, pharmaceutical extrusion, specialty devolatilization,” he said.

The key to the company’s success was “understanding our core technology and strengths, combined with listening to our customers, and keeping an eye on both existing and potentially new and emerging markets, and don’t get too smart for yourself and remain humble,” he said. “Humility is very important when you are facing complex tasks.”

Martin delivered many presentations and authored numerous technical articles relating to an array of extrusion-related topics. He was co-editor of the textbook Pharmaceutical Extrusion Technology (1st and 2nd Editions) and the twin-screw extruder section of the German Plastics Handbook (Hanser 2022). He held two extrusion-related patents.

At ANTEC 2026 in March, he was honored by the SPE Extrusion Division with the Heinz Hermann Award for significant contributions to the advancement of twin-screw extrusion technology.

Asked in 2020 how he would like to be remembered, he told PMM: “I try to listen to a lot of smart people, but at the end of the day, I make my own decisions. I recognize that sometimes I am going to be right and sometimes I am going to be wrong and, hopefully, do everything with a lot of humility.”