Rate My Professor Tim Dransfield

Tim Dransfield serves as Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Northeastern University. He received his B.S. in Chemistry with Distinction and Highest Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995, an A.M. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Harvard University in 2002. His doctoral research, conducted under James Anderson, examined gas-phase radical reactions in the lower atmosphere. From 2002 to 2004, Dransfield completed postdoctoral research in the same group at Harvard, focusing on oxidation pathways of small organic molecules in the polluted troposphere. In 2004, he joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he held various faculty positions, including lecturer roles, before moving to Northeastern University. Throughout his career, he has taught chemistry courses to diverse audiences, ranging from graduate students to health science majors. At UMass Boston, he led the team-taught graduate course on Green Chemistry multiple times and oversaw the integration of green chemistry topics into survey courses.

Dransfield's research interests blend computational chemistry with gas-phase kinetics and mechanistic studies, utilizing infrared spectroscopy to identify gas-phase and aerosol species. His scholarly contributions include several peer-reviewed publications in prominent journals such as the Journal of Physical Chemistry A. Key works encompass 'Experimental evidence for the pressure dependence of the reaction rate constant between acetic acid and hydroxyl radicals' with Y.-W. Huang and J.G. Anderson (2010), 'Rate Constants of Nine C6–C9 Alkanes with OH from 230 to 379 K: Chemical Tracers for [OH]' with M.M. Sprengnether and others (2009), 'Experimental Study of the Kinetics of the Reaction of Acetic Acid with Hydroxyl Radicals from 255 to 355 K' with Y.-W. Huang and others (2009), and 'On the mechanism for nitrate formation via the peroxy radical plus NO reaction' with J.Y. Zhang and N.M. Donahue (2004). He also co-edited the comprehensive volume Green Chemistry: An Inclusive Approach with Béla Török (Elsevier, 2018), providing a broad overview of green chemistry principles and applications. Dransfield's publications have garnered over 428 citations as per Google Scholar, reflecting his impact in atmospheric and computational chemistry fields. He has presented research findings through contributed posters at conferences, including the International Conference on Chemical Kinetics and American Chemical Society national meetings.