Charles Martin Burrill was born in 1901 in Hennepin, Minnesota. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1923 with a degree in electrical engineering. Burrill was hired by General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and placed in their G. E. Advanced Course in Engineering, which he completed in 1924. By 1929, he was serving as an instructor for the course in addition to his supervisory duties in Tuned Radio Frequency Receiver Development.

In 1930, along with the majority of General Electric’s radio engineering division, Burrill was transferred to RCA in Camden, New Jersey. Following an 18-month period with the Rogers-Majestic Corporation of Canada in the early 1930s, he spent the remainder of his career at RCA at Camden, then Princeton, where he engaged in research on sound recording, noise interference and suppression, and ultra short wave propagation. He received four patents for methods that improved radio reception and that measured and reduced noise levels in radio.

Burrill was appointed as a special lecturer at the Newark College of Engineering (now part of the New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1956. He served as the first chairman of the Board of Editors (1958-1959) for the journal of the Industrial Research Institute, Research Management, and later served on the institute’s Board of Directors. Additionally, he was a life member of the Institute of Radio Engineers (later the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE) Burrill retired from the David Sarnoff Research Center in 1966 and died in Princeton in 1997.